Great find, NC... Someone on another forum was just asking if there was anything like this available...
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=296051 There you go for your phpbb people. I'm still stuck trying to figure out a solution for this that works with my mod rewrite.
Looks like Google doesn't update the sitemap status very frequently. I just checked and it says submitted: 4 hours ago, and downloaded: 4 hours ago, yet when I checked it about 30min ago it still said status is pending. Now will see how fast the goole bot comes , I need it very much because of complete overhaul of my site.
I setup the sitemap script to generate a new sitemap at 4am every nite and submit it. So far google seems to download it every day at 1pm. They crawled 1/3 of my site the first day and about a third every day afterwards. I haven't seen any more pages indexed but that will probably take a couple days. Im pretty excited.
It may download them, but they still haven't crawled one of my sites and added the new pages to the index yet. They've been downloading my sitemap repeatedly since I set up the sitemap last Sunday, yet I haven't seen any of the new pages that I added now show up in the index in almost a week. Anyone else run into this? Ian
Hmm this is cool. Main advantage I can see is for sites whose freshness > their pagerank->crawl frequency. I.e. you have a news site or blog with about 14 posts/week, but is only being crawled 3 times a week. It's basically like technorati's ping. I don't think a cron job is the solution... what you should try to do is setup a manual ping in the admin section of your site that generates a new sitemap and submits it to Google, that you initiate whenever you add or update significant content.
Thanks for sharing, pachecus. However, this thread is actually about Google Sitemaps Beta, not about sitemaps in general...
It doesn't appear to me that it has helped me much after 4 days after submitting but maybe it takes longer.
To sum everything up, if anyone wants to go at it manually, here is how the sitemap layout looks like: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd"> <url> <loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com/index.htm</loc> <changefreq>changefreq=monthly</changefreq> <priority>priority=1.0</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com/page.htm</loc> <changefreq>changefreq=monthly</changefreq> <priority>priority=0.1</priority> </url> </urlset> Code (markup): than just keep repeating: <url> <loc>http://www.yourbaseurl.com/page.htm</loc> <changefreq>changefreq=monthly</changefreq> <priority>priority=0.1</priority> </url> Code (markup): for all your pages you want to map. There are also other options you can put in such as lastupdated but I didn't find that too usefull. The priority is a value from 1.0 to 0.1 with 1.0 carrying the most importance and 0.1 carrying the least.
It looks like it's working for me.. I submitted a couple of sitemaps 1 to 2 days ago, and googlebot is all over the site now. Been almost zero googlebot activity this month until now..