Sitemaps

[Miluette]

Those xml/rss ROR things! I'm trying to get my head around them. I've been curious ever since briefly hearing about them years ago in a web class. (My last attempts to learn more fell short, and now I turn to you, O helpful forums!)

From what I've seen so far there are a few ways to do them, not all compatible with search engines. I'm just wondering which kind is. And then I can't seem to find a good example of how they actually work, or show up, or something. I thought I knew, but now I'm really not sure.

If it's how I think it is, then sitemaps are cool, and I wanted to do some for my silly little sites, hee.

Edit: Ohh, I found out some more things finally. It's a lot more involving than I initially thought. (I thought you'd upload a file and it'd be indexed just like that...shows what I knew.) Safe to say, I can see why most people don't do this. But for bored people like me...

[Databits]

Well a sitemap isn't the same thing as an rss feed. They are in fact both xml but they aren't structured the same. If you're wondering what type to go with, the Google version is your safest bet because anyone who isn't compatible with it (I believe all RSS browsers are) eventually will be. They use the ATOM RSS standard for things.

The thing that makes the RSS feed more difficult is that it's more like an update notification. You don't simply remove and add new things, you just add the the feed or update timestamps for existing things.

A sitemap xml file is exactly what it sounds like. It's just an xml file that defines the different location on your website.

[Miluette]

I think I figured it out. I made sitemaps for all my sites and submitted 'em to Google, corrected errors on each of them and now I just wait for their urls to be indexed all nice-like.

Makes sense to go with the Google version, since Google seems to be at the top of everything. Glad what I went with worked. (I used a generator to get started. :B) I looked around and saw formats with a lot of different tags for the same thing, so I was confused at first.

[Miluette]

Oh my. I did all this sitemap stuff to see if I could generate Google sitelinks for any of my sites (because they're just so cool, the little navigation links that appear below "major" pages in Google search results), but it seems there's no way to control whether or not you develop them. Aw.

[Databits]

huh?

To a degree you can, actually. You need to have a normal Google account and actually set up the sitemap in the account linked to your site. It'll also tell you reasons why your site may not be indexed properly after a few runs of their crawl bot.

[Miluette]

http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/articles/sitelinks.shtml http://www.seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/google-sitelinks-the-ultimate-faq/ I mean this stuff. There's no way to control it directly; your site just has to be popular and searched enough, basically. But doing all this stuff let me find out what they were called, hehe.

Most of my sites and their primary subpages were already very indexed, so there was no real reason for me to do all that. Might be for good in the long run though.