Google Sitemaps
In March, I wrote about Google Sitemaps, and pointed out that you can learn from the analytics that they give you. (Plus, if you have client side analytics, you don’t know when the crawlers come to visit, since client-side analytics don’t talk to the automated traffic. At the very least, you can learn when the Googlebot last visited from Sitemaps.)
As part of the Sitemap thing, it is nice to include a Sitemap so Google will do a better job of crawling your site. The downside is, Google’s xml conversion tools are not very user friendly. I made the mistake of sending the techies at a customer a note yesterday, “It’s easy! Just use Google’s little tools,” to which they replied, “If it’s so easy, you do it.”
So I found this tool, xml-sitemaps.com, that makes creating a sitemap in xml actually easy. You, too, can look like you know what you are doing in front of your boss and your customers when you use this free tool (or you can pay the $14.99 and get added functionality.)
Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics
May 17th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Robbin,
As a blogger user, I have no control over my website’s file system which forced me to search for other solutions to handle my sitemaps (not the actual generation of one but of uploading it). After searching in the newsgroups I came across a great hack which was to submit your Atom feed. It seems like sitemaps recognize RSS feeds as valid sitemaps and although you cannot edit it, it does serve the purpose. Try it out.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Hi Ohad. I wasn’t really thinking about a sitemap for my blog but your comment caught my fancy, so I tried it. (You know, I love to try everything except vegetables.) Google spit it all back at me because I had a link in every post that was not allowed in sitemaps — it seems like they don’t like the link that I always put to my own website. (It shouldn’t like those links any more or less than links out to other sites.)
Robbin
May 20th, 2006 at 4:00 am
Hi,
Not sure sitemaps refused your feed. I am really happy with the way they’ve accepted mine and have seen a rise in organic traffic since. You might want to contact sitemaps support and have them resolve it for you.
May 21st, 2006 at 1:06 pm
Sorry. I didn’t realize you were waiting for an answer until I clicked through to your coComments. I will take your advice *but* I have been much more involved with Google Co-op for my site - more on that one once I understand why that xml map was accepted but I can’t get my subscribed links to show…
Robbin
ps Ohad, I wish you would send me your email address or write me, steif@lunametrics so that I can write you off line. rfs