Site Map

[Bromley_Accountant]

I just registered for the Google WebMaster tools and completed the site map test. I got one error - Your Sitemap appears to be an HTML page. Please use a supported sitemap format instead. Could someone help as to what this indicates/means? Thank you in advance

 

[StartUpC]

This kind of sitemap is usually an XML file
There are free tools out there you can generate yours - even OFFLINE; Google them
After having the xml file (fancy named: sitemap.xml) you upload it to your site's home directory and inform Google with "Upload own sitemap" in WMT

 

[Bromley_Accountant]

Does this make much difference to my ranking if I leave it as it is?

Also a crawl error (may be to do with the same thing) Response code 500?

 

[OldWelshGuy]

500 is a server error it could be anything it is a general catch all response. The sitemap should be an xml sitemap, so adding your html page with all the links on your site on it isn't required.
remove the sitemap and ignore the request for one. Unless your site is badly designed there really isn't much need for a sitemap.

 

[StevePoster]

Does this make much difference to my ranking if I leave it as it is?

As mentioned above it must be xml site map not html sitemap. Yes, this will affect your site's performance because it will tell Google that your website pages are organized and web crawlers will usually visit your site.

 

[singhabhishek251]

You need to use xml sitemap for search engine as search engine only reads xml format and not html.

 

[fisicx]

Read OWG's post and ignore the others. The people suggesting you need a site map are wrong.

 

[Bromley_Accountant]

So I need to remove my sitemap or change to XML format? My sites ranking has been improving the last couple of weeks so I do not want to do anything that will affect this as Ii want it to improve much more still.

Someone also told me to make some changes in robots? I cannot post example and I do not have 30 posts yet to post links etc

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Remove the sitemap from google webmasterstools, leave it on the site, don't change the site at all.

What have you been advised about robots.txt file? be very careful there as it is an exclusion protocol, you can't tell the spiders what TO do, just what NOT to do. it is very easy to harm rankings by messing up on exclusion protocol.

 

[Bromley_Accountant]

Thanks for your responses.

Sitemap not been added to webmaster yet from what I can see - just tested via the webmaster.

 

[UKSBD]

You don't have to use xml for sitemaps, plain text is fine.

As suggested by others though, they are not really necessary unless Google is struggling to find your pages, and if it is, sitemaps are the least of your problems.

 

[JeniferJohn]

If you want to make sure which pages of your website are indexed by Google, you simply type in Google: site: (and your website here) to see how much results will find. This is the number of the indexed pages from your website by Google.

 

[Bromley_Accountant]

Thanks

 

[fisicx]

If you want to make sure which pages of your website are indexed by Google, you simply type in Google: site: (and your website here) to see how much results will find. This is the number of the indexed pages from your website by Google.

Nope - hopelessly inaccurate and pretty much a waste of time. WMT is more accurate but even then not 100%

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Google doesn't report perfectly any longer. the only sure fire way is to grab a unique snippet and search. oddly that method will often result in a page being returned that has no cache sowing in Google.

There is what Google says it does, and there is the reality of what it does

 

[JeniferJohn]

Nope - hopelessly inaccurate and pretty much a waste of time. WMT is more accurate but even then not 100%

If you do not see your inner pages in the results there is problem with them for sure. The only problem which I had seen while using this method, is that some times the number of pages in the left top corner is not accurate. But if you check the pages manually, is always completely accurate and you can easily find exactly which page is missing

 

[fisicx]

The only problem which I had seen while using this method, is that some times the number of pages in the left top corner is not accurate.

Which proves my (and OWG's) point.

 

[steved45]

Sitemaps are not essential but they do offer Google another way to crawl each site page and the more this can happen, better for indexing.