Anyone that has owned a website for some time or is involved in promoting their website will probably know all about submitting sitemaps to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
A sitemap is essentially a list of URL’s or web pages of a particular site laid out in a format that tells search engines what pages there are in the site.
This saves the search engines the time required to look through all the links of a site before it finds all the pages. This can help speed up the indexing of new pages and pages that change on a regular basis.
It has recently become much simpler to make search engines aware of your sitemap due to an agreement between the major players in the industry.
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html
All webmasters need to do now is reference the location of their sitemap in the robots.txt file.
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/robots-generator/ is a good place to look if you are not familiar with robots.txt files.
If your sitemap location is http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, in your robots.txt file you simply need to add:
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
That’s it.
According to the Yahoo Search Blog as referenced above, the major search engines will now all recognise this as a valid instruction.
So far it looks like the following Search Engines are onboard: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, IBM
One of the best free xml sitemap generators I have used can be found here:
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
It uses java so you may need to update the Java on your PC but you will be prompted if you do.
If you’re using WordPress, then a good plugin for automatically producing sitemaps can be found at:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
By the way, if you want me to have a look at why your links aren’t working, let me know. Probably a good Google would help you locate the problem though.
Rob.
I actually use the Google Sitemap Generator for my blog but one thing to consider is that it will not pick up peripheral pages like forums etc.
And I appear to have fixed the posting issue by just delving a little deeper into the WordPress support forums! Turns out it was a mod_security issue!
Thanks for the offer.