I've been reading a book on SEO and have read that creating a Sitemap for your website will help increase rankings. You can create a sitemap at this website www.xml-sitemaps.com. However, when I created a sitemap for my site, I added it to the /publichtml folder and now my sitemap looks like this: http://www.pokerisrigged.com/sitemap.xml I really don't think it's supposed to look like that? Can anyone help? I don't really know how to make my sitemap work? Am I supposed to link to it from my home page as well?
Hi, The sitemap will help get pages spidered, and hopefully indexed. It will not improve rankings at all. The sitemap.xml link above looks just fine. You want the file in your document root (your publichtml folder). Don't link to the sitemap from your home page. Add the sitemap to your robots.txt file. Your robots.txt file may contain more than this but here is what it would look like if you want all robots to spider everything but your cgi-bin directory. Sitemap: http://www.pokerisrigged.com/sitemap.xml User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Code (markup): Google, MSN, and Yahoo all have webmaster consoles that you can use to verify ownership of your site and help them discover your sitemap. You will have to create an account with each search engine but here are the links to get set up. Google Webmaster Tools MSN/Live Yahoo Good luck,
+rep for you mate, absolutely excellent reply. I just wanted to know, do I actually edit the .txt file or do I just put a script line up on my home page where the robots.txt is located? Also, my website is a forum and I can only use 500 links for my sitemap. I have far more than 500 pages and wanted to know if it is worth the $30 to get each and every page on a sitemap?
Just add your sitemap to the robots.txt file as shown. No link is necessary. All the spiders will find your sitemap simply by placing it in the robots.txt file. Use Google's sitemap generator. It's not too difficult to configure. Free is always good. Even using the sitemap generator do use webmaster consoles at the big 3 to see if they find errors. You can also change the crawl rate using Google's and they will report errors, if they find any. Google says a sitemap can have 50,000 urls. You can submit multiple sitemaps too. Cheers,
Sitemap's only allow the G Bot to spider the site properly (in theory), But I personally feel that including the sitemap rarely helps.
You've submitted a Sitemap for your site. As we explain in our docs, a Sitemap can help us learn more quickly and comprehensively about the pages of your site than our other methods of crawling, but it doesn't guarantee indexing and has no impact on ranking.
your sitemap is absolutely working well. what is it that you are worried about? sitemaps are there to help get your site indexed easily by crawlers yes you should give a link from your homepage to your sitemap also
Hi, i think site map not increase your sites SERP's i think it's help only for crawling your site in SE.
Hi Platefish your site map looks good to me but I can't get your home page to load is it supposed to be off line?
Sitemap is very important and it does help I agree with Robert's opinions made earlier Though sitemaps have no direct connection in helping your website to rank higher, it had a strong in-direct effect for getting it done. sitemap.xml/ and robot.txt help Google spider to get your pages crawled fast and in a proper way. And this helps your ranking.
Is it working now? Sometimes our hosting gets messed up, we need to change that. I'm having trouble understanding how I place the link in the robots.txt file? Can anyone help with that? Where can I find the robots.txt?
Hi. I learnt about the sitemaps recently and decided to find a simple and intuitive software for my website. Finally stick with sitemap writer pro. This powerful webtool generated the sitemap for my website in just seconds. Mayor search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Moreover) were able to index and read my sitemaps without any problems.
Sitemap usually just Help to Fast Indexed our website page on Searcg engine Like Google , and Rankings not only Caused to produced only Site Map, Rankings Usually can get From Back links and Fresh Contents or Originally Contents Etc..
This is good advice....Sitemap is very important.....Site map will help spiders find all the important pages on your website, and help the spider understand your website’s hierarchy.