Google site map

[Real Estate Forum]

check it out, guys
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

[sarahk]

Your thoughts on it Mike would have been good...

Here's my take (http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/cms-developers-google/98/)

Lots of real estate webmasters use "template systems" or "content management systems". From what I can see they are one and the same.

Benefits
We can now concentrate on making our sites human friendly (http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blog/google-sitemaps/97/), with correct markup, but we don't have to worry that the navigation from page to page is bot friendly because we have the sitemap (only Google for now, but the others are obliged to follow)

The Downside
Many of the CMS will be slow to integrate a dynamic sitemap with an automatic Google ping - meaning the site owners will be missing out.

In the short term there's a bit of extra work but over the weekend (it's now Sunday night for me) I've seen a proliferation of tools hitting the web.

The tecnology isn't hard so the professional CMS companies have no excuse for not stepping up. The GPL/free systems will be allowed a bit of extra time - but not a huge amount. If the sitemap proves it's usefulness then it will be a must have for any system.

I'd be interested to know which CMS system has stepped up to the challenge!

Sarah

[Real Estate Forum]

I just waited for your thoughts and now I'll simply agree :)

NO, seriously ... I have had no chance to look at it yet but have passed it on to Corey. Tonight I will have some more time to do some looking into it.

[gemini]

I've been playing with it last friday and saturday - its a little complicated with the dynamic sites since they don't have static pages and Google's xml generating tool is no help. I've been able to create one sitemap for google which is the most important for my directory and reflects all the content pages in descending order by last editing time :D I think its been downloaded three times - once per day - not as often as I setted it. The file is pretty big though - about 257kb of links... No page cached yet though..

[Phoenix Realtor]

Max,

I've been reading that things may not be back to normal over at G until end of the week or so (I think that's the timing I've been seeing). Guess they are still rolling out a few new tweaks.

I am really curious about this site map feature since it is so new. Keep us informed as you learn more, K?

[gemini]

I think sitemaps is a greate idea and there is big future behind it. I'm sure Google get it streight and work out all the bugs. Advanced Access surely can take advantage of this feature to make sure all their customers pages are fed to Google :) Very promissing thing.

[Phoenix Realtor]

Kind of like when we all had the "crawlers page" turned on, except this you feed directly to Google. Should really help Advanced Access sites!

[sarahk]

If you use Xenu to crawl your site (and it's excellent) then the attached spreadsheet will generate the xml for you.

Just output the Xenu results to a tab separated file, copy and paste into the spreadsheet and run the creategooglesitemap macro.

Your site still has to be spiderable and you need <1000 pages.

Sarah

[gemini]

Does it follow robots.txt rules?

[Real Estate Forum]

here is more info
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050602-195224 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/webmaster-friendly.html