Sitemap

Ive heard that having a sitemap will improve googles ability to index your site. I went onto mypagerank.net and their sitemap wasnt capatable with my efforts somehow. Can someone give me an example of thier sitemap or make up a real like simple one? I read on w3schools.com that a sitemap has to be in the <sitemap> things. I'm completely baffled by XML so any help would be appreciated.

Edit: Wow I posted in wrong thread. Moderators feel free to delete this thread.

Hay Prizzle
There are 2 kind of sitemaps, static (which can be dynamically created) or an xml sitemap.

Now TBH you don't need both and technically if you have enough equity and your site is freindly towards a "spiders" point of view you don't need one at all.

An XML site allows you to tell Google about all the urls you would like Google to index (this doesn't garentee that those urls will be included), this does have an added benefit of letting the search engines, not just Google, know how frequantly your content on any given page changes.

To learn how to create a xml site I suggest you read the info over at Google's webmaster tools -

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html

It goes into it in depth and it will save me explaining it.

Now TBH that sounds all good and dandy but the search engines are pretty good at indexing new content quickly as long as the page is accessable to them. This is where a static site map is useful. Again not essential.

A static site map is just a list of links to all the urls in your site.
I have made mine more user freindly by adding images and splitting them up over several pages, this then lets any site visitor know the depth of my site and where a particular page is in relation to the home page. A users re-orination page if you like.

I would suggest if you do this to add a maximum of 100 internal links per page and link to it from your home page with the link text site map. This way you provide a way for the search engines to circumvent any urls which are causing them problems with indexing and thus index the rest of your content.

A XML sitemap is not needed and if you have good equity coming into your site and at least an accessable site map off an already indexed page the search engines wont have any problems picking up new urls, removing old ones, finding redirects or updating their index when you update a page.

I hope that gives you an idea of how to proceed.
Jaz

Ok thanks. If anyone else would like to help then please go to this url

http://forums.devshed.com/xml-programming-19/sitemap-553717.html