OK, I have a sitemap google says it is not in a supported format! Reading this page http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34654 is like reading Chinese! I have no clue what format will go with my site or not. I use a template! Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Here the link to my site http://panacawriting.com/Panaca_Writing___Sitemap.html Oh and I know nothing about Python script.
The sitemap you generated is a sitemap designed for visitors, in HTML format. What Google is looking for is a sitemap in one of the specific formats they outlined in the help page you referenced. Probably the easiest way for you to generate a sitemap Google will like is the last method they mentioned, just a plain text file, no HTML, with one URL per line. So you would create a text file, probably name it sitemap.txt and in that text file just list out the URLs of your pages like this: http://panacawriting.com/Panaca-Writing-Design.html http://panacawriting.com/CopyWriting-Services.html Code (markup): The obviously continue with the rest of the URLs on your site.
Well, there are much more complicated ways to do it as well, however they are better suited to sites that have thousands of pages, are generated by CMS systems, etc. Also the other formats allow you to specify things like the last updated date of the page, relative priority, etc. But if all you need is to give Googlebot a sitemap the plain text format should work fine.
If you want a sitemap in the official Google sitemap format, you could use services like these to create one.
Yeh use http://www.sitemapspal.com it is free. But make sure you save the file as sitemap.xml. Also make sure that you upload a file called googlef3f8f7ed23535e75.html then verify that file with google.
well, I have used the one site I hadn't already used and Google doesn't like that one either...what a waste of time.
I have never liked the idea of sitemaps and have never used them. I am doing just fine without them. I suggest you leave them out of your site and work on your site's navigation and content along with good link building and article writing with rich embedded links. Hope this helps. Col
Well, I have done all that. I created a new site and they have dumped even more pages. I guess I should go back to an ugly beat up template.
Creating a Google sitemap does not necessarily mean that Google will crawl and index your entire site. In fact, if your site is created in a "crawlable" manner a Google sitemap shouldn't be necessary. If you just created the sitemap a couple of days ago, you haven't given Google enough time to schedule a crawl, perform the crawl, index the results, and then possibly crawl additional pages. That takes time. It also appears you might have just recently created the site. It often takes awhile for Google to initially crawl new sites, and Google often only indexes the homepage when they have first seen a new site. The best way to get Google to crawl more pages of a new site (provided the site is designed to be crawlable) is for Google to find a few good incoming links to the new site and (preferably) links to internal pages of the site and not just the homepage. Looking at panacawriting.com it appears Google has indexed a couple of pages from your site. Both the www and non-www versions of your homepage appear cached and indexed (you might want to address that with a 301 redirect) and there is one internal page (SEO_Articles_and_Tips-_Pana.html) which is indexed in the supplemental results. I can certainly see why that page is listed in the supplemental index and not the primary index... If you search for "Figure out what words your customers are looking for at search engines" in Google with the quotations you will find Google has already seen another 321 pages with the same content. Googlebot realizes it already knows about this exact same content from another page so why should it index yet another page with the same content?
OK, well what bugs me is clients have my link on their site and Google never notices. I did create a new site because the last template had some issues that they couldn't fix. Google had all my pages indexed not that long ago...then it went down to one then to 13 and now to 3. Google has never seemed to mind the SEO articles page; they always indexed it. As far as the 301 redirect I asked someone about that in another thread. I don't know how to mess with the programming because it is a template. I do have HTML access to certain parts of the page.