Sitemaps

Will doing regular sitemap submissions to yahoo and google help my placement or is it just a waste of my time?

In theory they would help.

In reality there is no guarantee.


Overall, you should balance the submissions - dont overdo them or possibly get risked as spam submissions and therefore ignored etc.

The sitemap, if any changes are made to it then it would be a valid submission - if no changes from the previous submission then it would be seen as a duplicate submission and most likely ignored as the original submission would still be queued as such.

On large sites + forums based sites like yours it can take a long time to get fully indexed - each forum has to allow spiders the access to index them and each one needs to appear as unique to merit indexing.

The only cure is time - if the spiders have the access, then time should see them indexing everything that contains valid content.

How often is too often? I have it submitted nightly

Nightly is likely too often in my opinion.

The reason is that it will not show up directly after submission and can be upto 4-6 weeks old listing in serps - but can be quite up to date as well - really just depends on g handling.

If there is a 4-6 week delay or any delay on your site from when info is crawled to when it is displayed then a nightly submission is too frequent.

If there was no delay then a nightly submission would seem fine provided there was daily changes.

I would cut the submissions down from nightly to weekly (or maybe monthly) to see if it had any affect and only submit it more frequently if there were changes on any given day.

sooooo, if I have a forum where the content changes daily.... what do you think?

The content may change daily - the sitemap wouldn't necessarily change daily.

My advice is analyse the search keywords or search strings most people find your forum with.

Check major searc engines for your rank for these terms.

Analyse if you can bring your rank up any with those terms - checking on other things I had mentioned in a message or other SEO thread.

If your site is indexed, and is being crawled regularly submitting the sitemap nightly will not help your cause to increase in keyword searches. It may well hinder your site and tag it as a spam submission.

I wondered if anyone knows about google sitemaps. If so, is it best to put daily on the pages or monthly or what? Or does it matter? What are the best settings for google sitemaps?

sk

I am no expert on it but I have started reading google sitemaps group information.

From that I have gathered the sitemap can be used to help determine priority (in conjunction with PR) on how often googlebot will crawl the site. The problem is that the sitemap itself may get linked to a bot queue and frequent submissions may not ensure that the old sitemap is removed from the bot queue and then problems arise when 2 sitemaps show different page structures... have been reading about some people still getting googlebot errors 6 months after they had updated to a new sitemap.

It would be great if google could actually clarify things but it appears they do not have the exact answer as to the behaviour of the sitemap in a bot queue and if a new sitemap will always replace an old sitemap... seems that in theory the new sitemap would replace all previous versions, but in reality there are some glitches and a lot of people reporting on errors on a googlebot crawl to pages that have not existed for a long time.

Well, gb hits my sites (two of them out of three) several times a day. I put up a new map as needed. Right now they have a real old map that shows very old pages that have not existed for years.

I noticed my competitors who rank higher than I do don't use a site map at all as far as I can tell. At least nothing called sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz. And I assume those are the only names one can use.

Frankly, I don't think they matter.

sk

For what it's worth, I've read that it's best to update your Google sitemap once per week, provided that you have new content.

HTH,
Sam

The best bet is rather obvious - just to put a realistic assesment of how frequently the page changes.

Some pages of your site will change more frequently that others so, if Google knows about that, it will help it to make best use of its time when spidering your site.

Changing the frequency to daily is not going to make it visit each page daily. It's going to make it's own decisions about how to use it's time - but if you let it know which pages change most frequently, then it can take that into account.

I am a believer in sitemap priority tag can be useful, so much I even "blogged" about it once

If bandwidth becomes a problem, be sure to gzip your sitemap (many sitemap generators support this as well)

DEBARATI, first create xml sitemap for your site.
Then
(https://www.google.com/accounts/Service ... 3Den&hl=en)
Create one use on given link then add your site and it shows you the step by step method how to add sitemap for google.

Then at the time of varyfication there is one code you have to put it on your root directory or if you select meta tag for varyfication then put that meta tag on your head portion.
Save then come on google account and click on varify button then i will automaticaly find that tag on your site and varify your site and GOOGLE starts crawling your site automatically day by day.

Site maps are a great way to get every page in your website indexed! They also help to exclude pages you do not want indexed! Great Fun!

Yeah i too think that sitemaps are really helpfull and yeah this code is also good and helpfull

use this tag

<META name="revisit-after" content="10 days"> or can also keep revisit after 7days.......


Regards
American Truck Buyer