XML Sitemaps

[mib]

Hello friends,

My Sitemap was created a few years back and now I've got a few pages renamed and some new pages added as well. As My Google Account prompts me Warnings would you please guide me though the process of resubmission my Sitemaps with needed changes? Should I just to change my Sitemap in Notepad and to reload it on my public server or should it be done by letting Google know about my changes on order the right pages be indexed there?

With much thanks,

[Doc]

A good question, mib...an issue I'll soon be facing myself. To add to your question, might the best thing be to simply replace the old sitemap with the new, and resubmit? Or would that fall short?

[wige]

Let me start by asking, what benefit are you looking to get from the sitemap? Sitemaps have two real uses: telling Google about new content so it can be crawled without waiting as long as it could take for Google to find the content automatically, or to show Google how to find sections of a complex site that Google hasn't found and indexed naturally. If neither of those situations apply, the sitemap really doesn't matter - having a sitemap won't improve the rankings of any page on your site, nor will it affect your crawl rate. In other words, if the two specific situations I mentioned don't apply, you really don't need a sitemap in the first place.

That being said, if you need to update your XML sitemap, all you need to do is edit the file and reupload it. Google should check the file for updates at least weekly, although you could resubmit it through GWT, or simply add the line sitemap: urlof/yoursitemap.xml as the last line of your robots.txt file to allow supporting search engines find the file automatically.

[Doc]

Let me start by asking, what benefit are you looking to get from the sitemap? Sitemaps have two real uses: telling Google about new content so it can be crawled without waiting as long as it could take for Google to find the content automatically, or to show Google how to find sections of a complex site that Google hasn't found and indexed naturally. If neither of those situations apply, the sitemap really doesn't matter - having a sitemap won't improve the rankings of any page on your site, nor will it affect your crawl rate. In other words, if the two specific situations I mentioned don't apply, you really don't need a sitemap in the first place.

That being said, if you need to update your XML sitemap, all you need to do is edit the file and reupload it. Google should check the file for updates at least weekly, although you could resubmit it through GWT, or simply add the line sitemap: urlof/yoursitemap.xml as the last line of your robots.txt file to allow supporting search engines find the file automatically.

Interesting, wige. I had been given the impression (there's no end of impressions available on the 'net for novices) that a sitemap was fairly important for Google PR. My sites are only five to seven pages, and all are linked to, internally. So if I'm understanding you correctly, I probably don't need a sitemap?

[wige]

PR only travels through links in XHTML documents, and (possibly) RSS feeds. Even if the spiders did consider sitemaps when passing pagerank, the sitemap file itself has no pagerank to pass, since it has no inbound links.

Google provides a list of some of the uses for sitemaps on their help page: About Sitemaps - Webmasters/Site owners Help. It is good to note that most of what a sitemap provides can be obtained through normal linking practices if you have an established web site - while adding a link to a new page to your sitemap will get Google to crawl the page, putting a link to the page on your site's home page instead will probably get the page crawled, indexed and actually ranking (thanks to getting a share of your home page's pagerank) much quicker.

[morestar]

I would first go here and get your new sitemap: Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator

And then if you haven't created a google webmaster tools account, go do that and you can submit your sitemap through there...

[claybutler]

I'd have to put my vote for https://www.automapit.com/

Once a month it automatically generates sitemaps for Yahoo, Goggle and some others and then loads them to my server. Cost me a dollar a month.

You can even set your preferences to ping Google when the new map goes up.

Best buck I've ever spent.

[LocalGoogleGuru]

PR only travels through links in XHTML documents, and (possibly) RSS feeds. Even if the spiders did consider sitemaps when passing pagerank, the sitemap file itself has no pagerank to pass, since it has no inbound links.

Wow Thanks wige, I didn't know that about page rank ONLY being passed thru XHTML and RSS feeds, now I'm wondering if there might be any benefit to adding sitemap for blog A on another one of my blogs, blog B

link to the sitemap of one blog ON another blog

Interesting...

[zeo]

I would first see what pages Google indexed for your site and make a note of that. Then use htaccess file to redirect old URLs to new URLs (use redirect permanent) and make adjustments in sitemap.xml to reflect these changes. Hope this helps.

[subsystems]

Sitemaps can be a pain in the backside on a dynamicly generated site like an ecommerce site.
I wrote a script that created a sitemap from our products database and ran it weekly. There were thousands of entries.

Even so Google wasn't matching the sitemap with it's index. The sitemap only ensured the sitemap entries were indexed, but any removed pages from the sitemap would remain in Google's index.

The only way I could keep Google's index reasonably current with available products was to do some 404 and 301 trickery. The products page would determine if a product was available or not from the database. If a URL was requested for a product that was discontinued and no replacement was available, I'd have the site display a friendly 404 page with proper 404 headers. Google would then drop the page from it's index when it felt the page was gone for good. If there was a discontinued product and a replacement was available the site would send a 301 redirect to the replacement product page. Google would update these the quickest.

So the sitemaps are good for getting your pages indexed but do nothing to deindex pages no longer listed in the sitemap file. Keep it in mind when editing your sitemap files.