Google Sitemaps

[Robin]

If you haven't created any Google sitemaps then you NEED to. Go over to here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

It explains it all, but basically you log into Google, verify yourself by uploading a file to your server, create and upload an xml file to the server with all your domains and presto, a few hours later Google knows all your URLS without crawling them.

I have an example sitemap file you can look at here to see how you do it...

http://mashups.com/sitemap.xml

Use right-click save as -> don't click it, that won't work.

It seems to me you have to use every opportunity you can get these days and this is definitely an opportunity because I bet you don't have every page on your site linked somewhere Google can find it. This way you'll ensure that Google knows them all.

[gonzo]

If you haven't created any Google sitemaps then you NEED to. Go over to here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

It explains it all, but basically you log into Google, verify yourself by uploading a file to your server, create and upload an xml file to the server with all your domains and presto, a few hours later Google knows all your URLS without crawling them.

I have an example sitemap file you can look at here to see how you do it...

http://mashups.com/sitemap.xml

Use right-click save as -> don't click it, that won't work.

It seems to me you have to use every opportunity you can get these days and this is definitely an opportunity because I bet you don't have every page on your site linked somewhere Google can find it. This way you'll ensure that Google knows them all.

This information is a :-pearl:

[TheEnforcer]

EXTREMELY good tip Robin. I'm gonna pin it! :okthumb:

[fusionx]

Easiest way I've found to create your site maps

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

If you are using WordPress there are a few plugins you can use to automate the process. They'll update your site map and ping google, etc..

but for sites without automation tools, that link makes it painless :)

[Robin]

fusionX, that xml-sitemaps.com site looks interesting but... I never put quotes around my URLs and so it spat out meaningless links like:

"http://mashups.com/about.htm</a>about<"

I'll keep an eye on it though in case they start allowing bad coding like mine.

I may try the python script that Google recommends but there's a problem with both of these. They only spider links. We want to find all pages - so I find it best to go through my FTP program looking at every .htm page and then pasting it into xml by hand - that way I know I've got them all - even if I haven't correctly linked between them for spiders.

Oh, and Google also tells you a lot about your PR and where you are in Google for certain serach terms - they really are opening up about what they do - they must be quite confident they can avoid scam.

[fusionx]

fusionX, that xml-sitemaps.com site looks interesting but... I never put quotes around my URLs and so it spat out meaningless links like:

"http://mashups.com/about.htm</a>about<"

I'll keep an eye on it though in case they start allowing bad coding like mine.



hehe - I doubt they will code in routines to fix non-standard html.

Why wouldn't you use quotes on your urls, and other tag attributes? Just curious.

[Robin]

I never use quotes because you have to Shift and press the single-double quote key. So that's four extra keypresses for each URL. And I have always hand coded every piece of html. In the old days when I was getting 100s of thousands of hits a day on a page it would save on bandwidth and loading time. Nowadays I do it because it works.

Same way I never use /body and /html tags - also I never close any formatting tags inside frames because a /td closes them all for you. I do loads of non-standard stuff but it works in all the browsers - and Google still crawls them fine too :)

Oh, BTW - they have now amended xml-sitemaps.com after I emailed them - and it works great with or without quotes now.