MyRedPacket

Hello,

Just after some advice. Is it a good idea to submit a sitemap to google? I have read various opinions, some say it is helpful, some say it isn't and can do damage. My situation is, my site has been live for a few months and currently i have 2650 indexed pages in google (and ranking of 1). My Alexa rank started at over 6.4 million to now just over 1.5 million. I have just had to change the directory for my site, as the redirect before was causing problems with analytics data. Whereas it was www.myredpacket/Shop/index.php, it is now just www.myredpacket.co.uk (with no re-direct). I know i have to wait for google to reindex my site to update all the 404 error status codes being returned. Bummer i know! (for some of my search terms i am already on page 1!)

My query is 3 fold:

- should i submit a sitemap to google to help with indexing my new pages (i have never submitted a sitemap)?
- if so, would you go for a free sitemap generator (xml-sitemaps have one for 500 pages max) or purhcase one that allows unlimited pages?
-will the fact that my directory has changed in fact damage my standing with google ie will i go back to the beginning in terms of what has already been acheived?

Sorry for this long winded post, i can anyone give me some advice?

THANKS IN ADVANCE! MUCH APPRECIATED.

sastro

Of course its very important to submit your sitemap to search engine. Sitemap bot crawler will crawling your link and indexed it to their seacrh engine. So many link indexed in search engine, so much change your web site to get visitors. Its not so difficult to make a php script that will auto create sitemap.xml from database. But if you too lazy to scripting, just use http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/. This is auto sitemap creator and auto upload to your website.

You can submit your sitemap to some search engine manualy, but its better if you use cron job to do this.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sit...om/sitemap.xml
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExpl...om/sitemap.xml
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?site...om/sitemap.xml
http://www.moreover.com/ping?u=http:...om/sitemap.xml

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Bagi Zoltán

If you're good enough in link building -and guess you are if you had great rankings- i think sitemaps are not so important to submit, but if you moved your site to a new domain i suggest you to place a redirection code to a .htaccess file at myredpacket.com/Shop/ folder with the following content It will make unambiguous for the search engines that all the content was moved permanently.

Good luck!

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MyRedPacket

Hi Bagi

Thanks for your advise. To be honest i'm not that great at linking, according to your iweb checker i only have 49 backlinks! Does that mean i should submit a sitemap?

We haven't actually changed the domain, it has always been www.myredpacket.co.uk. The original redirect was changed to a 301 as it was search engine friendly, but now there is no redirect at all.
Not sure if i'm making any sense here.

take care

Bagi Zoltán

In your thread starting post your link was broken, i mean that it didn't contained any tld and was automatically redirected to myredpacket.com/Shop/index.php and your second link myredpacket.co.uk seemed to display the same content and it confused me a bit, that is why i gave you the 301 redirection code. I used this Firefox extension for the quick link lookup option but at the com site. Now i see that the linkdomain:myredpacket.co.uk -site:myredpacket.co.uk query (i deleted www from the beginnig of the URL intentionally) diplayed 146 links at Yahoo! Site Explorer, but the domain is pretty well indexed 2490 pages at Google, but only 34 of them is not in the supplemental index. It is quite common phenomena (my site suffer from this as well). As conclusion i belive that your site rather need strong backlinks and deep links than a sitemap submission.

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submitceo

I hope this isn't too long of a response but felt it would help clear up this discussion or at least add some good thoughts.
Here is a clip from a previous WebProNews article and video interview with Google's Fox that works with the sitemaps.

Google’s Central Product Manager Vanessa Fox does not consider sitemaps to be a hinderance.

“There’s no difference in indexing based on how we found a page.”

Fox advises going along with the rules, such as making sure webmasters have a crawlable site, that’s well linked, and has excellent exclusive subject matter.

“You know, links to your site, internal links, make sure we can access and crawl the pages, make sure the content is unique and valuable, and know there’s a lot of things that go into it. We’re not just going to take the sitemap and index all these pages, no matter what they are, just because you submitted a sitemap. I mean, clearly. But, why not do both things, because a sitemap will add to, there’s a couple of times when a sitemap is particularly valuable.”

Fox feels a sitemap doesn’t take the place of those features, but works as an extra tool for webmasters.
Fox included that a sitemap may make it easier for webmasters to find problems in their sites.

“If the site has pages with errors that prevent us from crawling, the pages won’t appear in the index and those pages will be listed in the Crawl Errors section of Webmaster tools. We may not have attempted to crawl some of these pages if they weren’t in the Sitemap, so in this case, a Webmaster might be alerted to problems not otherwise known.”

Fox looks forward to future advancements to allow webmasters know about more problems. Fox thinks Sitemaps enable webmasters to get a complete look at their site.

“A sitemap is a way for you to say here is every single page on my site, here’s a comprehensive view. And, that helps us out, and it helps the site out.”

Fishkin doesn’t believe that sitemaps help.

“The data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn’t accessible, doesn’t carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hindrance.”

Fishkin still believes sitemaps cause obstacles that stand in the SEO’s way.

I believe that if you have a quality site that plays be the rules, a sitemap will help. It also helps if that same account spends money with Google on their adwords. Yes, money even talks at google. I have a budget of around $80k a year with them and I can pick up a phone and get a live person any time I want. Couldn't do that when I was spending 0.00

MyRedPacket

Hi Bagi
I'm sorry but i jsut realised that the first link that i put in my initial thread was wrong. i put www.myredpacket/Shop/index.php, where is should be www.myredpacket.co.uk/Shop/index.php. Oops, not sure if this makes any difference to your opinions? www.myredpacket.com is another domain which is interchanging from one site. Do you think i still need to have the Redirect 301 / http://www.myredpacket.co.uk / you suggested from wwwmyredpacket.com/Shop folder?

MyRedPacket

Hi Submitceo,
Thanks for your reply and taking the time to paste these articles! Very helpful thank you

submitceo

You're welcome.
I think it is very helpful to have such references from industry experts.
It is also good to hear a Google employee and a very strong SEO expert sort of go head to head. I think it balances the thought process and opens the mind.
I must be tired, I am sounding like Yoda.

Chart Music

If your going to have a sitemap and I think it's a good idea then use the robots.txt file and added it(sitemap.xml) there. That way other search engines can also make use of your sitemap.

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MyRedPacket

Thanks Chart Music!
In your expert opinion is it better to generatea ROR sitemap or pure xml sitemap?

Chart Music

I use XML as that's what http://www.sitemaps.org/ says.

I don't really know enough about ROR to comment.

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submitceo

If anyone is looking for a "no brainer" way to make sitemaps, xml ror and html you can go here xml-sitemaps and they offer up to 500 pages free. It is easy and fast if you don't have a good grasp on how to do it. Also, if uploading to your google account they work well without errors.

SEOVibe

Wordpress has a great google sitemaps generator plugin too, it can be modified for non wordpress php sites.