Hedir Review : How many of us are using Google sitemaps?

kio · Joined: 01 Aug 2006 Posts: 2 141 Hedir Points

I use Google Sitemaps for many sites. It's great free feature.
The main advantage that I could submit RSS sitemaps and that each site could have many sitemaps at same time, so it means that i can submit few RSS feeds at same time.

One more great Google free tool that i descovered only a month ago - free site statistic software under AdWords account https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=1591 Google - it's absolutely Free and very very powerful and useful + user friendly.
Google offers so many powerful at useful projects for free, i love it.
Esepially the home program for spy - Google Earth Smile

xomero · Joined: 01 Aug 2006 Posts: 5 331 Hedir Points

i'm using in my sites and with my clients, but i did't see a difference in the google index process if we have a good navegation in the site we don't need a special tool for the spiders.

PyroJunkie

We have about 25% of our site with upper case first letter page names
for instance: Wedding-Fireworks-Display.htm

Our Google sitemap.xml corresponding pages entry is

<url>
<loc>http://www.phoenixfireworks.co.uk/Wedding-Fireworks Display.htm</loc>
<lastmod>2006-06-26</lastmod>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>

This is as it should be..... However we get an error in the Goggle
Sitemap facility that says it can't see the file.

Having experimented with .htaccess we see that if you redirect
Wedding-Fireworks-Display.htm to wedding-fireworks-display.htm then
Google sitemap will see it and not flag the error.

BUT you loose all forms of Page Rank because Google sees the page as
permanently redirected.

Some might say the best way is to reset all the pages that start with
upper case with lower case versions, but that will set up back 3 months
in the page ranking stakes as Google will see it as a new page.

I have validated the sitemap.xml code and it checks out just fine and can rule sloppy coding out.

Is there anyway I can tell google that the mixed case of our urls in
the sitemap.xml are the same as the ones for the site pages, and are
not to be processed as lowercase, (as google sitemap is currently
processing)??

Any deep thoughts our there??

ireneherz · Posted: Wed Aug 02, 2006 3:04 pm Post subject:

have no idea whether it helps or not, but i found a free tool and it takes only a couple of minutes, so what the heck.

dacode · Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 1 67 Hedir Points

Hello all,

I do use Sitemaps for most of my websites. I've noticed that the Sitemaps gets parsed rather quickly now (when it used to take days), and it depends of the website as well. The ones that I do update on a regular basis tend to be more "followed" than others. And as far as the Sandbox thing goes, newer websites have to wait quiet a long time before I can get the firts stats about serps.

ireneherz · Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 6:58 pm Post subject:

what statistics? am i missing something?

evie_h · Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 38 2637 Hedir Points

I tried to use google sitemaps but all the page appears in the italian language, although I am in Greece. My italian skills are only basic so I don't understand much of it.
Does somebody know what I can do against it?

baggeroli · Posted: Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:58 pm Post subject:

I can't find a Greek version, I always seem to get a Dutch version. I guess your IP gives it away. But here I get an English version.

evie_h · Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 38 2637 Hedir Points

An english version would be fine- but still, everytime I log in, the italian version appears. Even through the link you sent me.
I have an ADSL connection from a greek provider, so my IP is changing frequently. Strange that my IP is always so misleading

PeterFCJ · Joined: 15 Aug 2006 Posts: 23 1589 Hedir Points

I use sitemaps on all my sites, new pages get crawled and indexed quite quickly.

AjiNIMC · Joined: 11 Apr 2005 Posts: 516 18600 Hedir Points

Also try http://www.google.com/webmasters/ , this has some real good help.

choudiandian · Joined: 17 Oct 2006 Posts: 8 522 Hedir Points

I use sitemaps, and update it every one or two months.

Neocortex · Joined: 01 Aug 2006 Posts: 45 3023 Hedir Points

I am also using Google Sitemaps and i really recommend this tool. I will soon add an article here that why to use google sitemaps, which can be found from my site, too.

Henry G · Joined: 03 Jan 2007 Posts: 113 15365 Hedir Points

I have used it on all my sites so far except one.

it's ok as giving us more info and monitoring googlebot
it appears to have no influence on PR whatsoever

so i don't bother being serious about it - i just make something thin but very accurate, uploaded it and forget about it.

chillfire · Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 8:37 am Post subject:

All of my sites have google sitemaps, all of my sites except one are dynamic, so the sitemap is generated direct from there, great - no updating tet files!!!

Also worth looking at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites , you will need a yahoo account, a different idea to google, you can add feeds but dont have to as yahoo uses its on index to display the results, has backlinks etc.