I was told this is good to do for the SERPS and SEO, but how? http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ is this a good site to do it on? It seems to make it pretty easy just want to be sure I'm going about it right. Also Google already crawled my site. Is an XML sitemap still useful to do anyway? My site is a forum so many pages are there.
agreed.. i use xml-sitemaps.com/ also. just for reference this site freesitemapgenerator.com offfering free sitemaps generator too.
Thanks guys, I'll give it a try and let you know how it goes! This is all new to me, I love this forum Okay it's being made now...taking a while but I'll check back on it in a bit. Once it's made is there any specific step I take to submit it to the search engines? Edit: It's been over an hour, it still says generation in progress, should it be taking so long? Edit: Okay I got it, and downloaded it. It says I need a google webmaster account to use it though?
Sign upto webmaster tools by Google and you can tell them where you put the sitemap so it gets indexed quicker It isn't too important unless you have a massive amount of pages.
Only downside is that they have their link on your sitemap but it's not like people are going to view it anyways.
Yeah the site listed above is the easiest way to go about it. It justs hands you your xml file in so many formats its ridiculous
Yes I have over 60,000 pages - it is a forum, so that's why, all the topics and boards and pages. The Google tool does this--making a site map for 60,000 pages for free? What's it called? Google tool? Do I need to download anything? I just never heard of this.
I've got a site that sells some products. When you search for that product on Yahoo, it shows the xml sitemap on Yahoo instead of the page. Is there a way to stop this from happening so that the spiders/bots can still crawl all the links with in the xml sitemap but not actually show up on the search engine?
Groovystar, if you want to make some useful tweaking of the sitemap generated do the following: - decide on which fragments of your site you want to bring more focus - having done that block with "nofollow" the rest, making it possible for what you want to "emphasize" to be followed - run the generator - it does obey the nofollow declaration and will bring the rest into the sitemap - bring back the links / restore - get rid of the nofollow Using this technique can make some wonders
Okay...thanks...but how do I do that? I wuld think the more pages the better, right? They're all original content on my site. I made one with this http://www.seoutility.com/it/tools/google/sitemap_generator.aspx but it stopped doing anything and the original front page is still just sitting there, does it mean the whole thing was just given to google already without me doing anything but putting my url in and hitting Genera Google Sitemap? It didn't giev me anyting to save or anything.
The SEOUtility one is all you need. Just remember KEEP ON SUBMITTING. Google will pick you up about 1/10th of the time now that caffeine is running.
..Caffeine? What do you mean, one tenth of the time? Sorry...I'm just new to this. I submitted it to that site, I just didn't see anything sent back to me or go to a new page saying "Submitted" or anything so I don't have a way of knowing if it went through. Nothing was uploaded to my site or anything. That supposed to be how that site works? ...Fine by me if it is...less work for me. How often do I hit Submit on there?