Google Sitemaps Makes Life Easier For This Webmaster
December 20, 2006 – 11:48 am
I’ll admit at first I was reluctant to use Google Sitemaps. I figured “why give these pricks any more info than they already have”? Then, it dawned on me: “Google already knows everything, anyway. Succumb. Succumb.” With that thought, I went ahead and entered a website into the program. As soon as I did, I saw historical data! They’re tracking us all, whether we’ve claimed the website or not.
Depending on how low you’re flying off the radar, you may want to steer clear, but for the average webmaster, joining Google Sitemaps has some distinct advantages. One of the best things you get, is you see exactly what’s happening on Google’s end, and that alone is worth its’ weight in gold.
Let’s say you do something really dumb: like disallow all your content from robots.txt, or make any type of error that affects a template, and hence tons of pages. In this instance you can find out almost as soon as it happens (or at least as soon as you login to Google again). In the past, you would have had to wait for the manifestation of your problems before you would even be aware of the problem. Now you can proactively fix it at the first hint of trouble.
Adding a sitemap itself to their program is also easy and worth the effort. I’ve seen a marked improvement in the spidering of a few websites that I entered into the program, so that’s anecdotal FWIW proof that it helped. All in all, Google Sitemaps helps keep you synched with Google, and I probably should have joined earlier, despite my concerns about privacy.
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- Dec 21, 2006: Down And Dirty Google Sitemap Generation For Wordpress
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10 Responses to “Google Sitemaps Makes Life Easier For This Webmaster”
I love Google sitemaps, i don’t know if yahoo or what ever has the equivalent but it has really given me a boost in traffic.
Its the best thing to sign up too!
By Mike on Dec 20, 2006
Are you using a specific plugin? The best one I thought that would work came from DagonDesign.com .. others are using it successfully, but it doesn’t work on my site and conflicts with a few other plugins. I know I went out of my way to “add” my websites to this google webmaster page, but I just looked from your link - and I have yet to add an actual sitemap to each. D’oh! I keep getting distracted moving from sitemap plugin to plugin to find the conflict culprit.
Maybe I should just use their google script, setup a cron and do it that way… Hmmm.
By HART (1-800-HART) on Dec 20, 2006
I wrote a short PHP script. I can let you have it, if you’re using PHP and MySQL
What I’ll do is make a specific post with how I did it. I went for the easiest solution I could.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 21, 2006
Darren,
As you say:
I probably should have joined earlier, despite my concerns about privacy.
I don’t think there is much privacy on the web.
In future articles could you talk about the Google webmaster tools?
What they are and what they do?
I look forward to reading your posts everyday.
Keep up the good work and
Happy Holidays…..
By Bill on Dec 21, 2006
Happy Holidays to you too, Bill.
I can definitely do posts on the Google Webmaster Tools. I haven’t even used all of them so it can help my motivation to try them all.
Thanks for the comments and for reading.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 21, 2006
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final heres the link for a plugin i use on my website, its really good for generating your google sitemaps.
By Mike on Dec 21, 2006
I’m using my own Down and Dirty Google Sitemap Generator.
A hand-rolled solution.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 21, 2006
I have started a new blog using wordpress and are having sitemap errors.
I started building the domain by hand and then went back to wordpress. Even though my sitemap doesnt have an old page url in it, google keeps saying I have an error.
“When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot due to an HTTP status error. All accessible URLs will still be submitted.”
Will this error correct itself over time?
By Malc_E on Dec 22, 2006
HTTP errors generally mean a connection problem.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 26, 2006