Does Sitemaps really Work??

[greeneyedfrog]

Hi,
I'm having real problems with googles sitemaps. Although Google is downloading the xml file and looking at the robots text it seems to be completely ignoring it and just doing what it wants to ie not much.

I have over 250 pages on my site (www.greeneyedfrog.co.uk) but Google is only indexing 24. MSN has over 200 listed. I just don't understand what I'm doing wrong unless Google doesn't like dotNet and prefers static pages.

The site has been up for only 8 weeks now and has a PR of 4 but I would have expected more than 24 pages to be indexed.

ps I just did a Google site: and now only 2 pages are listed! Sitemaps was set up 10 days ago.

Hope someone can shed some light on this one.

Thanks
Rachel

[scrubs]

Hi,

It looks like you have caught a PR rank very quickly for your website.

Looking at your site I would recommend that all of the pages are unique, as you stated you feel there may be a problem with the dotNet pages being read, but this is not proven yet! Personally I would offer G structured pages and not use Products.aspx?rid=2&catId=62 for your site build.

Saying that it looks like G hasn't been through the whole site yet so don't panic. When the complete site is indexed (crawled) you may see the site build issue come into play. For example, you may do a site search in G and only see 6 of x results for example, this will mean there is an issue with your page build and content and G only wants to display 6 pages of your entire site.

My experience of G SiteMaps is very limited. I have heard mixed reports, I hope you can get more feedback from other members on this.

Hope this helps

[DarkMatter]

10 days is nothing in search engine time....just be patient.

[Archiseek]

Am a big fan of the sitemaps. It's been very useful to me in getting Google down into the further levels of my own sites and my work site.

[JEC]

Sitemaps has worked for us. I like some of the additional features, like showing my keywords and where they rank. I wish there were better explanations on a few of the other tools, like which pages had low page ranks and which had higher. Overall, very useful tool.

As everyone has mentioned so far, probably be patient is the best thing you can do along with building and submitting static pages. If your site is mostly dynamic, how do you show those pages in the sitemap file? I would imagine you'd have to include every single page with every possible query string combination in the sitemaps file for the spiders to crawl. That seems like a very tedious task. Knowing Google, there's probably some easy work around. I don't have much experience with submitting dynamic pages.

JEC

[Archiseek]

i use
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

crawls through all the long dynamic urls etc

[greeneyedfrog]

I'm using SoftPlus Gsite crawler for asp. Google recomends some tools but u can't use them with asp.

A lot of sites are dynamic but still get indexed. Msn works fine but then Google is a bit of an enigma.

We will persevere for a while with sitemaps but are thinking of putting a static sitemap page on the home page, listing all the other pages and see if that helps.

[greeneyedfrog]

Thanks for all your help.

I have asked my developer nicely (my husband) to do a mod rewrite and then put these more search engine friendly urls in the sitemaps xml. I'm sure this will then work.