Question
I ran across this the other day and it intrigued me a little. I have heard that a really good sitemap is a great way to increase visibility and page ranking, and was wondering if anyone has tried uploading their sitemap directly to Google?
Are you seeing any benefits?
Also, their recommended tool to create a sitemap was a little cumbersome and I have found a easier one here. Instead of downloading a tool and dealing with all of the Python stuff, this one works within your browser in Java and allows you to save the file locally.
Just curious...
Answer
I do.
WAS getting updated pretty quickly before October 16th.
Since then, Google seems to have 'lost the directions' to my site.
Although I've added and added stuff, and updated the sitemap and uploaded it (successfully & without errors) to Google, it's like they went *poof* into thin air.
Google hasn't been around.
I'm still holding excellent placement in Google, and my traffic has remained stable (slight daily increases), but the bot 'got lost'.
I use GSiteCrawler.
Answer
Kathleen that is strange. All 6 site maps I have in my account were downloaded in the last 24 hours. 2 of them 12 hours ago and the other 4 on the last 3 hours. Did you verify your site? I'm talking about the stats on the site map page not the actual spider that crawls your site.
Mike
Answer
Well, two of the sitemaps that I uploaded yesterday seem to have been crawled already. The third didn't, but in looking into it further it appears that the verification html page I uploaded was changed to a .txt doc.
I fixed it and I'll see what happens.
Answer
Google's 'downloaded' the updated maps, usually within a few hours of re-submitting, just hasn't been to the actual site to crawl the new pages. (Cache shows new pages as 'page not found')
They (Google) finally did crawl the new pages late last night/early this morning - finally.
Am unable to verify my site.
Answer
All three of mine seem to be okay, downloaded about 6 hours ago, But I did notice with the new Google update a few of my keywords have slipped a little. Seems more of those links that head to ebay have gotten ahead of me.
See ya, Country Joe
Answer
Country Joe,
Your "rank slippage" (pardon the term!) is probably due to the recent Google update... which is still ongoing, I believe.
Kathleen, you may want to check the Google Sitemaps Group forum, here: http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps?lnk=lr
... if you already haven't.
I'm having a bit different problem with sitemaps, but I don't believe it's related to yours.
Cheers