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dan
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Joined: 18 Jul 2007
Posts: 63
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 Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 7:27 am Post subject: Google Sitemap, XML and RSS Validation. |
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This is a reply to a members question. I wanted to post it here for my own information as a reminder of the posted links and other information.
Hey Billy
Here is the link to google instructions:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8467
I use google's crawler for my links. It was over a year ago when I downloaded it and installed it. It is a python program. It does a good job and crawls dyanamic pages as well.
A lot of webmasters are making the mistake of creating their sitemap and not adding it to their google's webmaster account. This was a change by google. At one time, people provided a link to their sitemap on their website. You now need to have an account with google and provide the link through your account. The above link should help you out.
If your site is large, be prepared for it to take a while to crawl the whole site.
I won't give you my whole xml file, but here is an example (note: my whole xml file is huge -- it would take over 130 seconds to download it on a 56k modem).
| Code: |
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.filipinaeyes.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-09-11T22:12:31-06:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.filipinaeyes.com/index.html</loc>
<lastmod>2007-09-11T22:12:31-06:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url> |
By looking at my example, it should help you with the instructions at the above link. Sorry, I would have to go back and reread the instructions again to give you details.
Good Luck.
VALAIDATION
p.s. I forgot to point out something that is important. Make sure you validate your sitemap. I can go on the net right now and find hundreds of sitemaps that do not meet xml standards. If they do not meet xml standards, google won't use it to crawl your site.
Here is a good link to validate your sitemap.
http://www.validome.org/google/validate
Most validators can validate both a sitemap and a sitemap-index. A sitemap is a xml file that contains all your links. A sitemap-index is an index of sitemaps.xml files. If you have a huge site, you may want to break it down into smaller sitemap.xml files. A sitemap-index lists all your sitemaps for google to crawl.
This is another good reason to use google webmaster tools. If you submit your sitemap through google webmaster tools, it will tell you if you have errors or not. Usually after you submit your sitemap, it will say pending. Give google an hour to process your sitemap. Come back to your tools account and if your sitemap is not valid, google will tell you the error.
I'm not going to debate validation standards so please no emails. I will say that not all validations are equal. For example you could validate your html code, have errors, but it will still be crawled by google and other search engines. Yet, if you have validation errors for your sitemap they are useless and will not be processed by google.
By the way, you don't need a sitemap for google to crawl your site. To be honest, I probably would not have one if it was not for my dynamic pages (gallery, forum, etc). Google has no problem finding your static pages, however, dynamic pages is another story (at least my research at one time said this was the case). By using a sitemap, I'm helping google find my dynamic pages.
While I'm at it, I my as well mention RSS validation. I believe you can have xml errors in your xml file and it will still be read by rss readers. Some of my code does not validate because of google adsense. There could be a way to eliminate adsense code from the xml file but I have not had the time to research. I will have to investigate this more when I have time.
Here is a good link to validate RSS files.
http://feedvalidator.org/
Here is a link talking about sitemap-index files
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html#sitemapFileRequirements
NOTE: Sept 14, 2007. Things change and it is a full time job keeping up with webmaster requirements. However, you do what you can do and every little bit helps when it comes to google and other search engines. |
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