Google Sitemaps - Data is not available at this time.

It's been 3 days, do I have a problem?

[dbar]

I'm new to sitemaps, signed up after pubcon Vegas, submitted a site and verified it. I did not actually submit a sitemap as it says that is not necessary to see data about the crawl.

I did this for a site that had gone PR0 awhile back and googlebot was only visiting the homepage. I wanted to see if this would show any errors. But right now no data is showing and it's been 3 days (yes googlebot has visited a few times). Anyway, I saw similar comments about data not being available in this thread [webmasterworld.com] but didn't see any response to that question. So I was hoping maybe a thread specifically to this problem might get some answers.

Googlebot has started crawling several of my pages again (instead of just the homepage) in the last few days so hopefully I'll get indexed again.

I'm excited to see if I'm having any problems (if it would tell us if our site had a penalty that would really be great) that I wasn't aware of, I'm just waiting for Google to Show Me The Data!

Any idea how long I should expect to wait?

[edited for spelling & thread link]

[Vadim]

I don't know what happens when there are no sitemap, but for me it took only about couple of hours to approve the sitemap and get the statistics.

I believe the sitemap may encourage Google to crawl your site again and may be even recalculate your PR and SERP. In a way you help Google to understand your site better. On the other hands, if there are no sitemap and Google has no interest in your site Google may simply have no stats for you.

If your site is small you may simply use free Xenu utility. It gives you the list of the URL on your site. Copy the list into the Notepad, save as txt file with UTF-8 encoding and your site map is ready.

Vadim

[girish]

Vadim - "site is small" -- please define small? would a txt file work for a 2300 page site?

[Vadim]

To dbar
I forgot to mention that to get statistics you also should "check" your site with Google uploading the empty txt file with the name that Google will give you. If you did not upload the checking file it may be the reason why you do not see your stats.

To girish
It will work if you may copy and past the thousands of links to Notepad or write a utility that converts html list to plain text.

The limit is given in Google and as far as I remember it is 50,000 links.

Vadim

[dbar]

Thanks Vadim,
I did upload the file from google and the site has been verified. I'll use Xenu tomorrow and give that a try.

Maybe 30 pages have been crawled since I signed up for sitemaps, but nothing is in the index (hasn't been after going pr0 several months ago). I wonder if a site has to be in the index to get actual data to show up. And possibly not have a penalty (not sure if it does).

Also maybe I'm confusing what data will show up. Right now all that shows is:

Under Crawl stats - "Successfully crawled" has a red bar, "page rank low" has a red bar. Nothing else is showing

Under Page analysis - Type text/html is blue, and Encodings US-ASCII is blue. Nothing else is showing

Under Query stats - Nothing is showing, it just says Data is not available at this time.

Under Index stats it just shows stuff like site:mysite.com, but since the site is not indexed, nothing there.

Under errors, they all say "You have no errors to view"

So maybe it is working and just not indexed and/or penalized? Off to bed, I'll upload a site map tomorrow and see how that goes. thanks.

[garyr_h]

dbar, if the site isn't in the index, how would Google show data about your site? The data shown is top query searches and top query clicks. If your site isn't listed in ANY query searches how would they provide data for it...

[dbar]

garyr_h,
because I use buy adwords to generate google traffic to the site. I assume that should do it, but maybe not?