XML Sitemaps: Are they all the same

Hi All,

I used a free online XML sitemap creator -- which seems to work -- and submitted it to Google webmaster tools.

The site has been indexed, but only 3 pages of 30+ pages.

Are all sitemaps created equal?

Can anybody refer me to a How-to guide or free sitemap creator that may be better?

Do you need to re-submit the sitemap to google often?

How important is it to submit one sitemap with the www. and the other without?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks ... and have a great 2011!

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Paul Stokes - www.eNewsletterSolutions.com

Hi pcstokes,

There are different formats of sitemaps but I believe xml is the most popular.

There are loads of free sitemap generators that are good and without knowing the particular one you used, it'll be hard to refer you to a better one.

No you don't need to re-submit to Google often. If you specifically stipulated the frequency which you want your site to be crawled in your sitemap, then the search engines would basically follow that.

However, if the search engines crawl your site and realize that you're not updating your site as often as you stipulated then, they're less likely to follow the frequency stated in your sitemap and crawl it based on the search engines on criteria.

You'll need to be specific and decide whether you want your site to be indexed and referenced because search engines will treat www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com as 2 seperate/different sites.

Hope that helps?... have a successful 2011!

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http://www.mauconline.net

Mauco, I appreciate the reply. But I would love a suggestion or two about who you use, hopefully free or cheap, as I'm not real happy with sitemaps. But, then again, I'm not really sure what to expect. I update my sites at least once a week but one program I use shows that google is not indexing that often, more like every 30 days.

Any advice? Thanks.

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Paul Stokes - www.eNewsletterSolutions.com

pcstokes, you could try: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Hope that helps.

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http://www.mauconline.net

Having a XML sitemap does NOT mean your pages will be crawled and indexed. It simply gives SE bots a way to find pages that may be "hidden" by short-coming in your site navigation.

A XML sitemap is a LAST RESORT method of getting pages crawled, and if the pages have no or very few links pointing to them they may not be crawled anyway.

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Link drop^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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Chris.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
http://webmaster-talk.eu/

Thanks Chris - nuked!

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/