Saturday, December 19, 2009

Why do I need an XML Sitemap


I really don't know why I need an XML site map for the search engines, but I just generated one. The last sitemap I generated was just about a year ago; the file was always left out on my server. In fact Google would come out and read the sitemap a few times a month.

Any way the XML site map differs from the html sitemap I generated yesterday; the HTML file is for people, while the XML file is for the search engines.

Just like last year I used GSiteCrawer. The program had crashed several months ago and I finally got around to taking a look at it, turns out I just downloaded it again to get it to work.

So the point is why do I need this file? The thing is the file size is 291k bytes and just burns up bandwidth off my server.

As indicated in the 'New Engineering Pages' blog a new page covering Feed-Through Capacitors was added [to interfacebus.com] at 7 PM last night. When I check at 5 AM today, the page had already been indexed by Google. In fact doing a search for that term returns my page at 49 out of 473,000 results. err, I didn't need a site-map to get a new page indexed hours after I wrote it ....

Whatever; Google indicates that 1,607 URLs were submitted [via the XML file] of which 1,481 URLs [pages] are indexed in their results. Now this differs a bit from the copy it replaced which showed 1,859 pages submitted and 1,328 pages indexed ? My computer also indicate more than 1,600 pages.

Anyhow this week I generated a new human readable sitemap and a new machine readable sitemap ~ that's a good thing.

I don't get it, but I would recommend you generate an XML sitemap for your site [if it's a tad large], many of the generators are free to use or download. You don't even have to tell Google, just add a bit of text to your robots.txt file which all the search engines read. My robots text file is blank right now, but only because I didn't want the other search engines downloading a year old file. But the command is: http://www.YOU.com/sitemap.xml ~ a line of text showing the location of the xml file.

I need a few lines of SEO link building:
2N2904 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N2906 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N6760 Derating Curve. Feild Effect Transistor

The graphic above is a test circuit for testing saturated switching time of a transistor.

4 comments:

Leroy said...

1/6/10 I ran the xml sitemap again and still it comes up with 1,614 pages while my computer indicates 1,800. I just don't get it.

I seem to remember last year I had it check my robots file or some other file and it did find those other pages. I see from Google Analytics there are over 1,700 pages getting page views????

There's no point in up-loading the new xml sitemap to Google just for 7 new pages.....

Leroy said...

1/8/10 Just wanted to let people know how often Google reads your XML site map you up-load.

It was read on Dec 19th, the day of the up-load. Then again on Dec 27th, and once again today Jan 8 2010.

Now keep in mind that just because Google indicates that it has downloaded it that does not mean that it looked at every line in the sitemap.

Leroy said...

1/19/10 Looks like Google downloaded the sitemap map again on 1/18/2010.

It looks like I've added 16 new pages since then which are not included in the site-map.

Leroy said...

1/29/2010 Google just down-loaded the site-map again. I think this shows the pattern or time between down loads.

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