Instaling Google Sitemap

Can anyone give me a general idea on how to install a google sitemap. is it hard or is it in the meta tags that I seen?

 

Sign up for an account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

Create a text file that has a URL for each page of your site, one per line.

Name the file whatever you want and upload it to your server.

Follow the instructions provided to you by Google.

 

There are several ways to do this one is the above mentioned which is to create a .txt file with each pages URL one per line, another is to use any number of free google sitemap generators which will create an xml site map which you can upload to your servers root directory, finally you can use googles own method which uses a Python script while it is probably the most complicated is the recommended method by Google as it will create a compliant sitemap and automatically notify Google whenever there is a change in your site kind of like how blog pinging software works.

 

There are, however, many free generators
that do not calculate appropriate values
for priority and change frequency tags.

 

You also have to log back into your google site maps and then verify the file that you upload. I had an error just recently and it said a 200 error and it should have returned a 404 so google wouldnt validate me. I had to talk to my host and google to fix this.

 

You'll need to place your file at the root of whatever is being spidered. You are not allowed to place the sitemap at domain.com/sitemapfolder/sitemap.xml with a listing in it for domain.com/index.htm

Any of the better services will automatically ping Google when your sitemaps are updated whether you have an account with them or not. The account with them is more for your benefit to see what Google thinks about the pages on your site.

SEOTeam's error was likely during the verification of your account with Google, not the sitemap itself. Many websites redirect to the homepage or a super-custom 404 error page which does load correctly and returns an HTTP status code of 200 (Found). The trick is to setup some HTTP scripting which properly reports a 404 (Not Found) HTTP status code while still showing something nice to look at in your browser.

 

When I tried using google's own sitemap generator I couldn't get it to actually index any of the pages on my site. All it would do is index the URLs I gave it in the config file without actually crawling those URLs for more links.

I had much more success buying a sitemap generator.