[thelist] google does not index website????

[Ian Anderson]

Mark Rees wrote:

> I had this problem as well once. You can speed up the process a little by
> using a google sitemap. Read more here

Well, that is interesting - hadn't come across sitemaps before.

But Google don't imply in their reference materials that this is going 
to help the OP, do they - Have you direct experience that demonstrates 
this to be beneficial?

The site map is an XML description of the pages in your site.

"Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users cannot reach all areas 
of a website through a browseable interface. (Generally, this is when 
users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by 
following links). For example, any site where certain pages are only 
accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and 
submitting it to search engines...
Please note that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, 
the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover 
URLs. By submitting a Sitemap (or Sitemaps) to a search engine, you will 
help that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site."
from https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en_GB/protocol.html

The OP didn't say that he had submitted his site to google directly
(http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl) - surely this is the 
first step.

I didn't get the feeling from Google's materials that adding a sitemap 
was a necessary step, or that it it would help with the problem 
described where a site has been moved and now seems not to be being indexed.

Perhaps there is an issue with having one site at two apparent domains - 
for example, is the redirect from one to the other done using 301 
redirect or 302?

However, that was a really helpful reference to the Sitemaps feature.

Cheers

Ian


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