Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I`m often asked, "why doesn`t Google crawl my site faster?"

While there can many reasons for this including server speed, in my experience, the main reason is this:

If Google doesn’t find a good number of relevant, quality links pointing to your site, it doesn’t consider your site to be very important. In other words, the more relevant, quality links your website has, the more value Google places on your site - hence, the more your site is crawled.

Here`s how having a sitemap can help: When the Googlebot gets ready to crawl your site, the first thing it does is look for a sitemap. If it does not find a sitemap, it will proceed to crawl your site manually and determine for itself your site`s most relevant pages. So the main advantage for having a sitemap is speed.

By speed I mean, Google will take much less time to crawl your site, crawling will occur more frequently, and the Googlebot will automatically know what pages on your site are the most relevant.

There`s another reason why you should consider adding a sitemap to your website - increased PageRank. Let me explain:

In addition to external links, Google`s PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages your website has, the higher your PageRank. There is a caveat to all of this, however:

In order to reap the benefits of having lots of pages, it is advisable your pages contain original content and not simply be duplicates of each other. Otherwise, your website may actually be penalized and your PageRank may actually decrease.

So do you have a sitemap?

Have you realized the advantages I mentioned?

Dale King

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Better yet, just give Google your sitemap through their webmaster tools.

Good info. Along with a sitemap the fastest way I`ve found to get crawled is by having a  Squidoo lens with a link to your site. I had a PR5 ranked blog in three weeks once I linked from Squidoo.Also having a blog with links to your site helps.

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Get Out of Debt

In their webmaster guidelines; Google requests that every page on your site be reachable through one static link (unless your site is very large). This is another good reason to include a sitemap.

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Best Regards,

Victor Wise

Well, I`ve just added sitemap on my website.

Thanks for the info.


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www.WanHart.com

wanhart,

That`s a good thing!  Besides the benefits that have been previously mentioned if you have listings that end up in Goggle`s supplemental listing and you add a site map, it may take a few weeks, but most of them will appear as listings instead of just suppressing them as supplemental.

Is your site map dynamically generated, when you add new content?  If not you may think about updating it when you add new content as well or just find the software that you can dd to your site that will generate it for you.

Best of luck!


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Arsenal Marketing
WEB 2.0 Internet Marketing for Business
http://www.arsenalmarketing.com
Joe@arsenalmarketing.com

Reach a larger audience!
Start blogging today!
Using WEB 2.0 strategies & techniques!

Are there any google sitemap generators that you recommend?  After reading up on this in google looks like it needs to be in an .xml format for the robots to read it.

I found this one:  http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Looks like I would need to go back in and update anytime I add pages, though.  I used to use XSite Pro and it would create the sitemap and update automatically I believe.  Also, for my blog I have the `google sitemap` plugin installed.

Thanks! :)

Here is my favorite for you to use:
http://www.sitemapdoc.com.

You must ensure that you have a regular
page that is a sitemap and an xml sitemap. The sitemap generator above makes both an html sitemap and an xml sitemap. You need to upload these 2 sitemaps to the root of your website by opening it in your html editor.

Once that is done, you need to submit this sitemap to Google and let them know that this site is yours. You submit your website here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps.

Copy the list of urls from your html sitemap and add it to a notebook file. Save the file as urllist.txt, submit it to Yahoo at:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit?.scrumb=cFF6tnT T3/g

Best of Luck!



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Arsenal Marketing
WEB 2.0 Internet Marketing for Business
http://www.arsenalmarketing.com
Joe@arsenalmarketing.com

Reach a larger audience!
Start blogging today!
Using WEB 2.0 strategies & techniques!

All very good advice tips. I will have to go and tell my clients they might want to work on creating site maps and see it it helps their rankings.

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china business card / Wall Street Journal Reader

Wow!  Thanks Angela!  I thought it would take a bunch time and neurons to get a sitemap done, but that tool did the job in two minutes.  Only one thing - they said to store the sitemap.xml file in /public_html/, but google didn`t see it there, so I had to move it up to my base URL at http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com to get it registered with Google. 

Everyone with a web site should know about this tool!

Rich Cooper

http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com

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Expert Witness Providing Litigation Support in Software, Internet and Electronics Technologies; Patent prosecution technical advisor; Analysis of English language content; Natural language processing technologies; Automatic generation of patent claim charts