Sitemap XML vs TXT

Is there a difference

[notbob]

My google sitemap is in txt format. Google downloaded it once, spidered my homepage and never came back. The site is very new.

My question is would the xml format be more effective in drawing the googlebot or does it not make a difference?

Thank you

[Clint]

Somewhere on these pages is info with I think said xml is preferred.
[google.com...] . You can also find more info on the Site Map thread. [webmasterworld.com...]

I haven't tried one yet.

[SimmoAka]

I'm using a .txt file and its being downloaded very regularly. I've had it in for 2 or 3 weeks and i'd say it's getting "downloaded" every couple of days on average. Might have something to do with teh regularity of content changes.

[notbob]

Is there an easy way to convert my sitemap.txt into an xml format?

[BigDave]

I can't see any difference between formats.

Don't expect Google to fully index your site any faster with a sitemap. It might happen, but do not depend on it.

Do you have a few incoming links from already indexed pages going to different pages on your site? That seems to make just as much difference to the speed of a sitemap being used as when you submit your home page.

Did you already have one page indexed? without a number of incoming links, Google only seems to like to add a single page to their index during the first month that they know about it.

If you have decent PR deep links from several sites, that seems to speed up the process significantly.

[notbob]

BigDave

It is a domain that I have had for a few years, but never used for a site.

About 6 months ago, I put a homepage up with was indexed.

Over the last month, I have built a site, about 500 pages. I have a few IBL to the homepage, but not the internal pages.

I guess that might be my next step.

[twebdonny]

We had used a sitemap.txt file in a secondary domain,
removed it from the Google Sitemap submission pages, added a sitemap.xml file. Just noticed that Googlebot is still
going after the .txt file. Anyone else seeing this
occurring?

[Tami_SEO]

I have not yet found a way to convert the sitemap.txt to sitemap.xml except for elbow grease and making sure have the utf8 encoding correct.

If you want to start clean with a new sitemap generator, I have in my testing so far used two sitemap generators.

One worked with my websites hosted at AIT, it's called phpSitemapNG-1.3.2 find it at: [mambogurus.com...]
That particular software didn't work with my Verio hosted websites because of some security setting on the server. Also maybe because they needed to be running Python 2.2 and they were running 1. If it works with your webserver, this was great software, as it would submit your sitemap to google for you using the correct encoding.

If you do use this software, make sure that after you do your setup, that you manually include the www in your domain or google will not like your sitemap. The software isn't intuitive enough to put the www there for you I guess, even though it's designed to work with google.

The second really good one worked better for my php sites than the first. This one is from Vigos. It is a Free Google Sitemap Generator Software for Windows
[vigos.com...]

So far google likes the looks of my sitemaps from both generators. I'm still trying to figure out if the sitemap makes any difference. In one week I haven't seen anything exciting on my webstats, but then, I've always been a little impatient :)

[Johan007]

IMO if you cant auto generate your site map its not worth doing. It seems to me Page Rank is still a determining factor for speedy inclusion. I have set up one of my sites with sitemaps because Google was taking 8GB of data a month from my site.

In my experience: If you want your pages indexed as fast as possible stick a link to it from your homage. The pages that do get included faster because of sitemaps don’t rank at all well until the next site crawl! So I am thinking sitemaps may even be a hindering my site.

I have to look at it in more detail but can anyone concur?

[John_1976]

I use .txt format simply because I do not have the technical capability to do anything else.

However, what is the best way to list the index page?

index.html
or
[mysite.com...]
or
[mysite.com...]

Google sees my site as non www for some reason. Only if I search for my site by site:mysite.com will Google show a title and description. If I search for site:www.mysite.com only the url is listed.

I am hoping that as I have just started using sitemap and enter my index page as [wmysite.com...] Google will sort out my www and non www problem.

[Tami_SEO]

When my sitemap was created by software, it automatically left out the www. After submitting, I had an error on Google sitemap beta submission page. The sitemap Google engineer at the webmaster conference told me that the problem was that there was no www. If I had interpreted the error code right, it would have told me that my submission was not part of the domain, thus it was looking for a www.