Search Engine Cloaking and Optimization Forum

I've been working with Google's webmaster tools for several of my non SEC sites.

In order to submit a sitemap the sitemap must be in XML format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
- <url>
<loc>http://www.mydomain.com/site-map.cfm</loc>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.mydomain.com</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.mydomain.com/article.cfm/id/96</loc>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.mydomain.com/article.cfm/id/217</loc>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Can we add this?

You mean can you create a page that sends this to Google via Cloaker?

Actually it was meant as a feature request, but I've taken care of my immediate needs with a short PHP script that will generate the sitemap whenever google checks.

Are you suggesting that google is arriving and asking for a sitemap even if you have not registerd one with them.... that's new to me.... I have never seen a request in the stat logs for a sitemap but have seen plenty of requests for robots.txt which makes sense.... google is supposed to try to obey the rules by checking for the robot file... but they have no reason to assume you have a sitemap and I do not think they would waste time checking for a sitemap when they know that 99.3 per cent of the time there won't be one.....

So please explain are you actually recording hits for a sitemap even though you did not report to google that you had one? and what are they hitting sitemap.html or .htm or what....

And has anyone else ever seen this?

No, I never said that. I am playing with the Google webmaster tools, and wanted to provide a dynamic sitemap in the correct format for them.

I prompted this, not Google.

Have you gotten any really useful results with the google site map.... many here jumped on the bandwagon when they started the google sitemaps, however most of us got discouraged as it did result in google visiting the site map, but little else.... it seems (unless you have found something different) it is more trouble that its worth... the same amount of time spend pinging has always given me more google visits that to set up a sitemap...

I would be interested in your results.....

I'll let you know... I just started playing with it with one site a few days ago...

I have not yet used pinging... I plan on buying ADS, but I haven't been able to slip it in the budget past the wife yet.

I wish I could see some actual results, so I could more easily justify the expense.