Using Sitemaps with Google
As mentioned in the last post, I launched my finance and stock analysis website last month. While setting it up for Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools I once again noticed the warning on the front page of the webmaster tools telling me that i hadn’t submitted any sitemaps and that doing so could help google index pages from my site. Considering I built my site from scratch in php, without using an app like wordpress or joomla which have built in functions for creating sitemaps, I figured i was at a disadvantage in not having one…
After doing a quick bit of research about the format for sitemaps used by google, i put together some code to traverse my site and create a sitemap. I took the time to approximate the update schedule and importance tags which are part of the xml sitemap specification. The final result had just over 1700 URLs…
Here’s a summary of the site’s index status in google in the 3 weeks or so since publishing the site and submitting the sitemap:
- at the time of submission, the website had only 1 URL (the domain root) in the index which had been there for about 2 years.
- About a week later, google webmaster tools seemed to indicate that it had crawled a large amount of URLs in the sitemap. It was reporting a couple of broken links and the crawl statistics said it had crawled over 800 pages. At this point google was still only indexing the front page…
- In the next couple of days there were 27 URLs indexed in google, these seemed to pretty well with the be the URLs with higher importance assigned to them in the sitemap.
- About 2 weeks later i checked in again and saw that there were 533 URLs Indexed by google. This uptake of URLs in google was a lot faster than that observed with other sites that didn’t use a sitemap.
- I also checked in with Webmaster tools and it reported 10 pages had duplicate Description META TAGS. The reality was that every single page in the site had the same description! but google only reported 10 pages, even though it was indexing over 500…
I guess the takeaways are that the update schedule for google’s various data are not in synch at all (not really a surprise considering how much info and services they host). The other major point here is that using a sitemap has been a huge advantage for getting a new site listed. Although, i think a lot of this success was probably due to the trust built up with my domain, the so-called sandbox effect, after having it indexed for about 2 years already.
Anyway, as i also mentioned in the last post, i didn’t want to create external links to the site until Google had taken a good look at it on its own. So now that it has: Low PEG Stocks.com is the name of this stock ratings and analysis website i’m talking about. The site currently has no inbound links according to both Google search and Webmaster tools (these numbers can differ).
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