Introducing GoogleTM sitemaps
With the future release of Website Tonight ®, users will be able to automatically generate Google Sitemaps for their sites through Website Tonight.
The Google Sitemap Protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.
Here are the steps you will need to follow in order to generate a sitemap for your site though Website Tonight:
Ø Verify your site with Google (Refer to blog article :"Verifying your site using Google Sitemap" for details).
Ø Log into your Website Tonight account. If you have an active flash intro page,go into the Flash Intro Properties page and add the "verify-v1" meta tag information provided to you by Google. Then save the flash intro. If you do not have a flash intro page, then add the "verify-v1" metatag and its contents on the page properties of your home page.
Ø Publish your website. This will automatically create and publish a sitemap for you. The sitemap file names are: "sitemap.xml" for traditional pages, and "sitemapmobi.xml" for mobile pages.
Ø Log into your Google account and go into Webmaster Tools. The page will show you a list of sites that you have submitted to Google. Click on the one you want to manage, and then on the link that says "sitemaps".
Ø Click on "Add Sitemap". Then select the type of sitemap - General Web sitemap, or
Ø In the text box provided, enter the complete url of your sitemap which will be in the following format:
http://domainname.com/sitemap.xml for traditional website, http://domainname.com/sitemapmobi.xml for mobile website.
Ø You will now see the list of sitemaps for your site. Each will have a "Sitemap status" which will initially show a status of "Pending". Once Google verifies the sitemap, the status will change to "OK".
Over time, as Google crawls your website, you will be able to view more information and statistics of your website by going through the tabs "Diagnostics", "Statistics", etc. In our future releases, we will be improving on ways of how our customers can add more information about their pages that can be included into their sitemap.
This is great! Do you know how desperately I have been wanting sitemap capability? This is posted under "Coming Soon". When is it coming?
I've printed out this article, and picture me dancing in the aisles! I'll check now to see if I can find the "Verifying..." article.
lol
Yours,
Midge
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Hi Midge,
The Sitemap capability is due for release next month. So look out for it.
Rumeli
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The sitemap capability was released yesterday, and you can start using it now.
Just a small correction to the original article- The mobile site map is generated as "mobisitemap.xml" and NOT "sitemapmobi.xml" as mentioned in the original article. I apologise for any confusion.
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