Google Sitemaps .........

[mpprh]

Hi

For those who use this, they have now added an additional feature. You can view how often the robot visits, and either slow it down or speed it up.

I've been sad when I've added pages, then waited for google to find them. This may be a solution ?

Peter

[Martha]

It seems to have worked well for me - I am just a few weeks into my SEO efforts and doing well so far, but google didn't index all of my pages till I added the google sitemap.

I used this to generate it, if anyone's interested:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

[AndyLucia]

Hi

For those who use this, they have now added an additional feature. You can view how often the robot visits, and either slow it down or speed it up.

I've been sad when I've added pages, then waited for google to find them. This may be a solution ?

Peter

Thanks for the heads up Peter, I went over and had a look. Unfortunately they won't let me speed up, but it was interesting looking at the indexing stats.

[maria-g]

Thanks for the info, will try it.

[Martha]

Hmm - Enhanced image search - that's new too, isn't it? Might well be worth a look.

[AndyLucia]

Hmm - Enhanced image search - that's new too, isn't it? Might well be worth a look.

Don't know what it does, but put myself down for it anyway!

[Eileen2]

Curious as ever as to what you clever guys and gals are on about here I did a search on google, but with all the reading I ended up more confused than when I started.

Could someone please look kindly on me and briefly explain the benefits of a site map, is it to gain better rankings? Are there any cons?

[AndyLucia]

Curious as ever as to what you clever guys and gals are on about here I did a search on google, but with all the reading I ended up more confused than when I started.

Could someone please look kindly on me and briefly explain the benefits of a site map, is it to gain better rankings? Are there any cons?

Well, simplistically (which is the only way I understand things! ), the only thing that the sitemap does is make it easier for the search engine spider/bot to explore your website; you've effectively given it a full set of directions, and made sure you've told it all the points of interest - a bit like giving somebody going to London the relevant pages from an A-Z and highlighting the Tower of London.

It won't guarantee higher rankings, but I feel it can't hurt to do it! Cons, none that I can see at the level of website we are using, it might be an issue for bigger corporate sites.

[Eileen2]

Great explanation thanks Andy.

I'm off to ask my brother to generate a sitemap for my website

He'll know I've been reading this forum again.

[AndyLucia]

Eileen,

Point him in the direction of the site Firebug mentioned, it makes it all pretty easy.

[Eileen2]

Thanks for that!