Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As we have been on a static system for the last 4 years and have a 3500 + page commerce site I am a litte concerned about the transition to a dynamic system. So, I am trying to do everything I can to make it as painless as possible.
Lets put it this way, if you don't make a sitemap, which is easy, free, and relativly quick, then if they DO work you are losing potential customers.
Erm, I doubt this. I hate to rely on third-party-software (a crawler or whatever) on such things. What do you do if the tool you used isn't supported any more in two or three years? To generate a sitemap is far from easy or quick.
Nevertheless, I found it a good idea, and whether we really profited from it, is hard to measure.
All in all the detailed standards are a matter for W3C rather than google, aren't they?
maybe his negative attitude is based on his own poor experiences?
Isn't this the point? We base our judgements on our own experiences if we have them, only relying on others' if we don't. I'm pleased if sitemaps is working for people, but I just don't see it myself. If the 'lesser' SEs can do a quicker job without the hassle of a sitemap (this is my experience) then you are entitled to criticise, or at the very least air your views.
As for a sitemap being easy, I agree with Oliver Henniges. I don't like to rely on auto-crawling software to generate one. So, even with a modest website under 500 pages, it quickly gets out of hand. All of which is fine if it lives up to its promise of helping push new and updated content to Google.
The point being if you are putting in effort for zero return, whilst other SEs seem to manage just fine without it, at the very least it creates doubt. What else are they screwing up that we can't test for ourselves? It's a particularly apt criticism of Google anyway since they make such a song and dance of their superior approach to search.
Lets put it this way, if you don't make a sitemap, which is easy, free, and relativly quick, then if they DO work you are losing potential customers.
Personally, I am up for anything legitimate that will possibly improve the speed at which my pages/new pages are crawled and added. Google through the XML sitemaps out there. So why not. Luckly part of the shopping cart I based mine off of has a lot of mods developed for it at a low price. So I did not have to code my own XML sitemap code. A mod did it for me. But, even if it had not been available, I would have gone ahead and made an effort to develope the XML sitemap. Maybe Google did not get this working as well, out of the shoot, as they/we would have liked, but it is a neat good idea. So, maybe it works for some of us today. Maybe it works better or at all for some of us tomorrow. In the end, why not try.
I think this is it in a nutshell. Google are poor communicators and, increasingly, are hiding behind 'Beta' software to push out technology quickly, without really bothering to think it through.
It would be really nice if Google would give more insight from time to time. But, what they have is minimal and always has been. As webmasters etc we are going to have to live with this and remember that Google has more to loose in most cases than gain by sharing information. It has probably become such a corporate culture over there that even when they think more information might be good to share it probably makes them very nervous. It would me if I were them.
Thanks everyone for sharing your experiance, frustration, and joy on the XML sitemaps. Hopefully more will come along and join in the discussion and we can all learn form each other's experiances.
netchicken1
I am a little confused. Are you using both a traditional dynamically generated or static sitemap and an XML siteamp?
However there seems to be a real reluctance to criticize any aspect of Google's operation. I don't know why this is since they do so little to instill loyalty.
I don't know that I would say there is a reluctance around here. I see people critises Google all the time and have for a while now. Unfortunately some people take it too far some times and becomes a rat rather than a good solid perspective/experiance. But, all in all, I don't think people are shy about it. I just think often it is hard to bring a real beef to the table about them. Yeah you can "take no blame" when things are in beta, but how often have we all worked day and night on something only to release it and go "Woops" ten minutes later.
I am not advicating them, trust me, I have had my issues and they have been just as plentiful as anyone elses'.
Anyway, back to XML sitemaps...
I have downloaded a couple of programs to try them out.
[vigos.com...]
This one which is free does an OK job except that you have to reenter the filters every time you use it.
I am careful to filter out any links that might bring up duplicate content pages. So *lastpost* *edit* *print* links are not indexed as well as *member* *profile* and other links to places not actually important.
It does have a tendancy to hang in the middle of indexing as well for me. That has made me look for better software.
So in the last few weeks I tried a commercial version, which is a heck of a lot more sophisticated, and i am just getting the grasp of. Sorry I don't have a link for it here.
Reading over peoples comments I have just linked the sitemap for the dynamic pages to the top of the dynamic pages as well for other search engines such as yahoo to index. The sitemap for the html pages has been linked to the index page for the same reason.
Cynicism is domain of the weary. To succeed you need to try every white hatted trick in the book.
