Hello... I've been trying to get a google sitemap but all the generators I've used seem to ignore all my content. What I mean is... There is a ton a entries for pages in my forum but none of the actual content pages on my main site. Why is it doing this and is this normal? I'm not going to submit the sitemap to google because honestly, I'm not worried about my forum getting indexed. My site has been up for about a month now and the only page indexed is the index still. I've been adding a good amount of content and I really want it to get indexed asap so I can start seeing some traffic flow. - Thanks
If your site has been up for a month with only the homepage indexed and all sitemap generators will only index your forums, I would bet that there is an issue in your navigation structure/code. What is your URL so I can have a look at your code, etc?
Is it possible to index forum pages regularly on search engines by sitemaps? I need an explanation about this because my forum is not indexing on search engines regularly.
The site is http://www.themetalguitarist.com/ After further inspection I think I figured out what the problem was. The address I gave to search was http://www.themetalguitarist.com but all the links on the page were http://themetalguitarist.com (without www.) So, which is better for SEO? All the submissions to directories have www. (I guess I do it out of habit). Is that bad or does it make a difference? I'm working on the site so some stuff might not be the same as when I was having problems if you go there.
Iven, at first glance, I'd guess it was a sessionID thing (turn off cookies in your browser and surf page to page looking for long bits of random text and numbers in the URL). There are ways to removes sessionIDs from your code or you could use a service like AutoMapIt that allows yuo to remove certain keys from the URLs that get picked up during spidering. Corky- The www issue would certainly do it. Although I love my www (it's simply 'proper' to use it), either way will work fine. The important thing is to pick one way and stick with it. Some webmasters even go as far as fancy htaccess code to force a URL one way or the other. I like using www (world wide WEB) for WEBsites because theres the ftp., mail., etc. and that's if you don't slap a forum. subdomain on it like forums.digitalpoint.com It all comes from your example.com domain, but I like putting the web at www. PS- on a WordPress site, fixing the links may be as simple as changing a config file... or you can submit as a non-www domain.... in which case, change your footer link.