Mokita - 2:51 am on Aug 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

I installed G Sitemaps for one of our clients in June, when almost all the second level pages disappeared from Google entirely, leaving only the index and third level pages - despite being a 6 year old site containing no advertising or blackhat techniques.

Installing Sitemaps worked its magic and the second level pages were re-indexed within days and all seemed to be peachy.

Last September I noticed a problem with both www and non-www results appearing in Google, so fearing a dupe penalty, I added 301 redirection code to .htaccess, which has been working as expected. This caused all the non-www dupes to end up as Supplementals, which I hope will soon be deleted (as per message #3035710 from GoogleGuy above).

However, my current concern is this:

From June till last week, the "Statistics" tab >> Crawl stats reported a table with "Your page with the highest PageRank". It had entries for June, July and August. However, ever since I indicated a preference for www over non-www, and Sitemaps installed the non-www as a separate site to "manage", the table indicating highest Pagerank has disappeared from the www Stats and is now showing in the non-www instead - with identical data to what was previously in the www's stats.

How can this be, as all non-www requests have been auto-redirected to www since September 2005 and all the non-www pages are Supplemental and have been for a long time?

KenB wrote: One additional thing I'd like to see with sitemaps is the ability to tell Google to not list/ignore any page that is not on the site map.

I'd like to second this request - it'd help solve a lot of problems.

[edited by: Mokita at 3:10 am (utc) on Aug. 6, 2006]