lucy24 - 8:40 am on May 5, 2011 (gmt 0)

Ugh.

:: panicked detour to google to make sure they aren't pulling the same thing on me, with further detour revealing that I've been mispronouncing one (non-English) word all along, and still further detour to verify that Bing isn't disregarding robots.txt* ::

You're definitely not alone, though. I fed a straight "sitemap.txt" into google, and found about half a dozen of them on the first page (I do 30/page). Same for "sitemap.xml"-- including, a bit hilariously, google's own :)

Can anyone figure out what the variable is? They crawl mine periodically, but it isn't indexed. The ones that are indexed seem to be completely random sites that nobody ever heard of. If example.com were a real domain rather than a reserved name, its sitemap would be indexed.

Aside: As long as I was googling, I searched similarly for "robots.txt" and found a lot of those indexed too. But unlike the sitemaps, they're for domains everyone would have heard of, like, er, whitehouse.gov or microsoft.com.


* Not my own, but on a site I'm pretty familiar with. I was searching for sitemap content and we've got a word in common.