[Web4lib] Sitemap.xml

[Tim Spalding]

It's really not that important. SEO people—I was one of them, once,
but a good one—tend to present what they do as black magic, and
something you certainly need their help for. Coming up with a valid
sitemap.xml is a service they sell. But, while it can help a bit on
the margins, most high-ranking sites don't have one either, and your
time is usually time better spent making your site better in other,
visitor-focused ways.

Incidentally, you can change the spider rate by signing up for Google
Webmaster Tools. Sitemaps allows you to control it area-by-area.

The main reason libraries don't score well in search engines are the
session-based URLs in their OPACs.

Tim

On 3/30/07, Thomas Dowling <tdowling at ohiolink.edu> wrote:
> On 3/30/2007 12:38 PM, VanderHart, Robert wrote:
>
> > A speaker on SEO at the IA Summit earlier this week stated that it's
> > very important to have a sitemap.xml file for your website to indicate
> > to spiders how often to visit your site.  I know from reviewing our
> > server access logs that spiders should request a robots.txt file before
> > indexing a site, and when I grep the logs I see plenty of requests for
> > that file.  But when I grep "sitemap.xml", I don't see a single request.
> >
> >
> > So the question is, if a sitemap.xml file is so important, why aren't
> > any spiders looking for the file?  I didn't raise the question to the
> > speaker because I couldn't view our log files while I was at the Summit,
> > so I wasn't certain whether we were getting any requests for sitemap.xml
> > or not.
>
>
> Unlike robots.txt, you have to explicitly tell the search engines about
> your sitemap.xml files.
>
>
> https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html#submitting
>
> https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
>
>
> --
> Thomas Dowling
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