View Full Version : Google Sitemaps One Month Later
Relevancy
07-06-2005, 03:00 PM
Well we know it appears to index pages faster then just waiting, but are we seeing any down falls or other positives from Google Sitemaps?
Is there any Google sneakiness going one as all us SEOers give them lists of our SEOed sites.
Thoughts?
I read this on seo-scoop.com (http://www.seo-scoop.com/direct_link.cfm?thepost=431):
"However, for the life of me, I cannot get it indexed at all in Google. I've got good links pointing to it from well-ranked, indexed, on-topic pages. I even created a Google sitemap, which has been spidered hundreds of times by Google. Still...not a single page indexed by Google. "
While I haven't tested this myself (or waded through all the posts in the Google Sitemaps Group), are you certain that Google Sitemaps does index pages faster than just waiting?
Thanks in advance for your info!
Natasha "The Girl From Marketing" Robinson
Relevancy
07-07-2005, 12:13 AM
They do index faster, but if your site is too new they will not index you till your are out of the sandbox. you have to wait like the rest of the newbies if your domain is newer then a few months.
AussieWebmaster
07-07-2005, 10:02 AM
I have heard that absolutely new sites are getting indexed.... couple of friends used the sitemap submitter for their new projects and got a solid response... now I am waiting to see if that is just the initial presence that Google sometimes gives as a welcome or if this could be a way to avoid the box....
mickisdaddy
07-07-2005, 10:34 AM
It took about 2 weeks to see any of the pages from my sitemaps being crawled that were not already in the index. The past few days though, I have seen Googlebot indexing pages from my sitemaps.
I have a site that is about 5 years old, but never have had any sort of sitemap. I have about 80,000+ dynamic pages. Google now shows 54,000+ pages most just show the URL and nothing else with a site: search. I recently redesigned the site look and structure and put 301 redirects from the old pages that changed to the new ones.
Relevancy
07-07-2005, 12:58 PM
Something else that appears to be cool with Google sitemaps is tht it appears to take pages out of the supplemental results. I just recently added a sitemap for one of my sites that was fully in the supp index and a few days later half the pages got taken out.
rustybrick
07-07-2005, 02:46 PM
Something else that appears to be cool with Google sitemaps is tht it appears to take pages out of the supplemental results. I just recently added a sitemap for one of my sites that was fully in the supp index and a few days later half the pages got taken out.
Now that is useful information. Anyone else experience the same?
AussieWebmaster
07-07-2005, 03:11 PM
This one is well worth running some tests on....
Relevancy
07-07-2005, 04:20 PM
Basic Case Study (http://www.searchenginerelevancy.com/news/2005_07_01_archives.html#112076742250814007)
I will watch the site and report any other details as seen.
Andy1969
07-08-2005, 05:56 AM
Something else that appears to be cool with Google sitemaps is tht it appears to take pages out of the supplemental results. I just recently added a sitemap for one of my sites that was fully in the supp index and a few days later half the pages got taken out.
I also noticed this shortly after submitting the sitemap for one of my sites, below are my findings:
Domian Sitemap.xml submitted to Google 15-06-05
site:www.Domian .co.uk
649 from www.Domian .co.uk - 15-06-05
Many of these links are from old site
300 urls added for new site using sitemap.xml
512 from www.Domian .co.uk - 20-06-05
During Google result testing could not find any old indexed web pages from the old web site e.g. old games pages (100s).
588 from www.Domian .co.uk - 22-06-05
638 from www.Domian .co.uk - 27-06-05
1,210 from www.Domian .co.uk – 4-07-05 *
*This final result was a surprise as a lot of the old sites indexed pages are back in the results! I am investigating this at the moment (luckily I have these old pages covered by usuing a cool 404 page).
More news as it happens!
stoner3221
07-08-2005, 08:52 AM
As soon as the Sitemap program was launched we started developing a script for a directory that would list all of the newly submitted topics. I thought it would be a great way to get new submissions in Google faster and deeper topics, not easily reached by Google cached. We have closely monitored the results and have been very impressed. I get Google alerts on test submittals in as little as 24 hours. It doesn’t necessarily mean however that the sites are cached by Google that fast, but the vast majority of the new submissions are getting crawled by the Googlebot right away. A process that normally took many days to weeks with deep category submissions. In my opinion it’s one of the best tools Google has come out with in years.
SebastianX
07-08-2005, 10:12 AM
It works better than expected. I've managed to get even orphans fully indexed within 4 days (that was an experiment). Once Google trusts a sitemap, it gets downloaded frequently, without resubmissions, and Googlebot crawls all new and updated pages harvested from the sitemap. Time-to-index has been improved to a great degree. URL-only listings have vanished, the same goes for most supplemental results. No flaws as far as I can see, congrats Google!
ocmaven
07-08-2005, 05:04 PM
A few of you mention supplemental results. Where do these appear and why do you want Google to remove them? Are these outdated results sitting in their cache? Our site has several no longer existent pages that are still sitting in Google's cache. Will submitting via Google's Site Map fix this problem?
ocmaven
Relevancy
07-08-2005, 05:58 PM
What are Google Supplemental Results (http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#label)
More: These pages in the supp index do not help your overall rankings and seem to not be indexed on a regular basis until Google sitemaps came along it appears.
Why are they bad? (http://www.searchenginerelevancy.com/news/2005_04_01_archives.html#111412076844874359)
More (http://www.searchenginerelevancy.com/news/2005_06_01_archives.html#111956456016388962)
Andy1969
07-12-2005, 05:30 AM
Domian Sitemap.xml submitted to Google 15-06-05
site:www.Domian .co.uk
649 from www.Domian .co.uk - 15-06-05
Many of these links are from old site
300 urls added for new site using sitemap.xml
512 from www.Domian .co.uk - 20-06-05
During Google result testing could not find any old indexed web pages from the old web site e.g. old games pages (100s).
588 from www.Domian .co.uk - 22-06-05
638 from www.Domian .co.uk - 27-06-05
1,210 from www.Domian .co.uk – 4-07-05 *
*This final result was a surprise as a lot of the old sites indexed pages are back in the results! I am investigating this at the moment (luckily I have these old pages covered by usuing a cool 404 page).
More news as it happens!
Results update:
734 from site:www.domain .co.uk – 12-7-05
Dropped 500 old pages?
mtauber
07-12-2005, 11:25 AM
What are Google Supplemental Results (http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#label)
How can i see the difference between Supplemental listings and regular indexed results in google?
Relevancy
07-13-2005, 07:06 PM
When doing a search or doing a site:www.yoursite.com in google there will be green writing that shows the url on the results pages. If you see "supplemental results" in green then that url is in the supp index.
What are Google Supplemental Results (http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#label)
More: These pages in the supp index do not help your overall rankings and seem to not be indexed on a regular basis until Google sitemaps came along it appears.
Why are they bad? (http://www.searchenginerelevancy.com/news/2005_04_01_archives.html#111412076844874359)
More (http://www.searchenginerelevancy.com/news/2005_06_01_archives.html#111956456016388962)
I have had supplemental pages indexed quite regularly and they do rank for some rare terms.
Why do you think that pages in the supplemental index do not help your rankings? Are you saying that you think the links on those pages are not counted by Google or....?
Andy1969
07-14-2005, 03:57 AM
These pages will then be seen as cookie cutter pages that are created with little value and then eventually they will be thrown into Google's Supplemental Results.
What do "Supplemental Results" look like? How do they appear in G results?
cheers
Andy
Relevancy
07-14-2005, 01:22 PM
Why do you think that pages in the supplemental index do not help your rankings? Are you saying that you think the links on those pages are not counted by Google or....?
I am not sure if links from a supp index page do not count, but it is probably a good possibility. The pages put in supp index do not seem to help your overall site theme. As soon as they go in the supp index they are on their own and that is why they get rare searches. Google doesn't want out dated never touched pages to help sites rankings, they want fresh content and sites that are dedicated to their sites.
There are old pages that never get put in the supp index, but that is because they are linked to from other sources and/or you might do a global footer change and make the page modified date new again.
What do "Supplemental Results" look like? How do they appear in G results?
Read my post above
mtauber
07-14-2005, 02:26 PM
Fore some reason I have never noticed the Supplemental results if you can suggest a search term where I can view some id really appreciate it
Relevancy
07-14-2005, 02:33 PM
Took a few trys but here is one:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-28%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=sick+feetcar
AussieWebmaster
07-14-2005, 07:30 PM
Took a few trys but here is one:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-28%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=sick+feetcar
Nice find... a single search result is rare too.
Interesting, but how do you know what Google wants?
My understanding of the supplemental index is not that it has anything to do with old or infrequently updated pages but is (according to Google and Googleguy):
the supplemental results are a new experimental feature to augment the results for obscure queries. This is a new technology that can return more results for queries that for example have a small number of results. So it might not affect the results for a popular search, but for a researcher doing a more specific query, it can improve the recall of the results. The supplemental collection of pages has been collected from the web just like the 3.3 billion pages in Google's main index.
Supplemental sites are part of Google's auxiliary index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.
The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.
It would appear to me that pages in the supplemental index are fetched only if there are not enough results from the main index in the initial ranking pool, but once included in the ranking pool they rank based on the same paramenters as a page from the main index. The fact that the PageRank is not affected by being in the supplemental index would seem to me to indicate that links from pages in the supplemental index are in fact counted just like any other link.