Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Sitemap Correction


I just noticed that a version of my sitemap was out on my server, it's an older version. Or perhaps a version up-loaded by mistake and not up-loaded to my Google Page Creator site. I use Google page creator to serve a number of pages and graphics to off-load the bandwidth from my server. Any way here is the correct address for the SiteMap.

I site map is used to list all the pages on a particular web site, like a table of contents. Sitemaps are just another way to show available pages. If you run a web site you should have a sitemap for a number of reasons. The best reason to produce a site-map is that it brings all web pages to the same level. Pages may be four levels down from the index page on a web site, using a site map brings all pages up to the same level. A search engine reduces the importance of pages for each level under the index page. Also lower level pages may not be spidered as often as other pages.

So the wrong sitemap was being downloaded around 5 times a day. That's 15,000kB a day at 300k bytes in file size. I've been working on reducing the server bandwidth over the last 3 months, there are a number other posts relating to increasing down-load speed / lowering bandwidth. The current bandwidth is 57.74kB/visit, which is no reduction at all.

Fixing this issue may help to lower the size/visit numbers. With all obsolete addresses, the page was not deleted but replaced by a redirect page of 10kB which is much smaller than 300kB.

Never delete a page address if you can avoid it, you never really know who may be pointing or linking to it. Delete the page and lose a link ~ never a good thing.

Actually the page was viewed 278 times this year or 834,000,00 Bytes ~

1 comment:

Leroy said...

I should say that the redirect page I added is not a 404 page, but a holding page that gives the correct sitemap address as a link and of course a google search bar. I also made sure I deleted any html comments from the code to keep the page size small in physical size. The search bar is the current version I'm adding to all the pages.

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