Hi guys,

Dean in the ultras forum posted this and I thought we should have the info here also.

This site has an automatic google sitemap generator:
http://www.sitemapdoc.com/

Just type in your URL and click on the Create Map button.

On the next page you then click the XML Sitemap button then right click on the sitemap which will highlight it and copy it to the clipboard and paste the result into sitemap.xml and upload it to your site. Repeat the process but this time click on HTML Sitemap and save results into sitemap.html and upload.

Finally you can tell google about it by going to
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login[url]

Thought I'd snitch this one also.

"10 Minutes to Your Google Sitemap..." http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-library/google-sitemaps-video.htm

The author uses the sitemap generator I've posted earlier and also shows how to validate and submit your Google Sitemap with a Google SiteMap XML Validator and Submitter at http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/

Thanks for that Simon - this is definately on my "to do" list for my sites.

Bambi

Update.

We'll I finally got a sitemap uploaded to Google that they didn't reject. I watched the video on gothrive listed below. Very informative and helpful just doesn't work very well from firefox so drag out the old IE. Ron uses a spider to crawl your site. Its okay but the spider at http://www.sitemapdoc.com/ is better and produces more links. Simply give it the URL of the head (top) of your site i.e (http://www.yoursite.com/head/).
It will crawl your site and list all the links and problems with the link. Very handy information. I fixed up 90% of my problem links and then just de-selected the links I didn't want to deal with at the moment. Now remember to set the update time, its down the right hand side and the priority as well. I set weekly and priority of 0.5. Now click the XML button and BAM you have the XML code. Copy it into a file called sitemap.xml and upload it to the head of your site. Get it validated at the site listed below (http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/) your basically looking for a report that says no errors. Then do battle with Google. Here is a better URL http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Login with your standard account and password. Tell Google about your site, then verify your site by adding a google supplied meta tag into the index page of the site and then submit a sitemap. Easy

But wait theres more Google slapped me again. I had a site with several sub sites (for a better name) that were:
http://www.yoursite.com/a/ http://www.yoursite.com/b/ http://www.yoursite.com/c/

each with its own sitemap pointing to content in other sub sites below
http://www.yoursite.com/x/ http://www.yoursite.com/y/ http://www.yoursite.com/z/

Google did not like this. Gave my sitemap errors for each site x,y & z said they weren't on the same site. So I changed to
http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/a/ http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/b/ http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/c/ http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/x/ http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/y/ http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/z/

only one sitemap http://www.yoursite.com/mysite/sitemap.xml with its own index page pointing to a,b & c and the site map pointing to x,y,z.

Now all is good with the world. Well until I looked at overture

Hey Simon - great update!

Now I know where to come when I get stuck.

Bambi

P.S. A camtasia "how to" would be excellent

Great job there Simon! Looks like you'll be the SEO expert here.

Nez

Very Detailed Post Frosty.

Thats great

Is the issue the site stucture or the number of sitemaps?

Have you tried one sitemap at
http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

this would be beter from an seo aspect because your a,b,c, pages are closer to the root url.

Normally most of the links to a site go to the root url is http://www.yoursite.com.

This normally means that the root url is considered to be the most important by the search engine and the closer your other pages are to this page then the better they will rank in the search engines.

It is all to do with linking and how the PR (page rank) is ditributed through the site via those links.

So depending on which pages you want to appear high in the search engines depends on how you do your linking.

Also by distributing the PR around the site it has a multiplier effect which means you can get more PR by linking the pages in a certain way than the sum of the PR of all the pages.

So I would be interested to know if you tried
http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

and no other sitemaps.

Thanks for all your info and sharing. I didnt know some of those sites you mentioned.

Glenn

Glen

I could have done that but I'm looking at putting together a generic site on a topic and have 6 or 7 subtopics related to each other as sub sites. This might not be the best idea but its what I'm up to at the moment. Sitemaps can be at multiple levels according to all I have read. But the robots.txt file must be in the root directory. This is another problem I've had with Google so I've added one and thanks to the following link provided by Google (thank you Google) I'm a lot wiser to what spiders and crawlers are doing and how to stop or encourage them onto my site.


The Web Robots Pages

Actually the Google help is pretty good. We're been hoping that one of the GURUs out there would provide us with a quick simple solution to the slap problem. But reading through the help indicates that some of that info may be incorrect. For example Goolge do not like hidden or misleading links. So the info about hiding links in pictures or using CSS tricks to make them not visible on a page will eventually be detected by Google and we'll get slapped again. At least that the feeling I'm getting for reading the Google Quality Guide. Check it out for yourself


webmaster guideline