Submitting a sitemap of your website should be a good way to get all your pages indexed. At least, this is what Google and Yahoo are telling us.
I created sitemaps using one of those online sitemap generators. They don’t always do a great job. Sometimes they will leave out pages. Sometimes they will add in ads or other non-content pages. And sometimes they won’t include the page modified date. Always edit the results correcting dates, frequency, etc.
Although I use an .htaccess redirect from my home page, index.html, to my domain name, sitemap generators will often list both. This is a duplicate content issue and so I remove the index.html page.
I also use gzip to compress the sitemap files to reduce bandwidth. My sitemap ends up with the name sitemap.xml.gz.
After uploading the sitemaps, I discovered that sitemaps for Yahoo should refer to the Creative Commons schema at Sitemaps.org. Google has their own schema. Although the body of the sitemaps are the same, I thought it best to use separate files for each. Maybe this is overly cautious. But I wanted to play it safe.
To verify ownership of my Easy Diabetic Diets website, both Google and Yahoo require uploading a file to the site. Google verifies the file almost immediately. Yahoo takes a while. Then I submitted my sitemaps. Google finds it within 5-15 minutes. Yahoo takes 12 hours or so.
After submitting, the wait begins. Neither search engine crawls the site right away. It can take days. And even after crawling, it still takes days to see any rankings, if there are any. So this is a good time to spend adding content. Be sure to add new pages to the sitemap or change the “mod_date” whenever a page changes.
– Rich Pulham
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