One of my clients, GettingLean.com, a fitness and health oriented website didn’t have a Google Sitemap, so we decided to implement this. I used SOFTplus GSiteCrawler to spider and automatically generate the sitemap.
For starters, upon spidering the site, we discovered problems with his 404 page. What happened was that the 404 page returned a 200 — a ok. This is not good, so before we could do anything else, this problem had to be adressed. We used some PHP magic and edited the 404 to actually return a 404 so that the search engines understands what to do.
With that problem out of the way, we continued uploading the sitemap.xml file to Google, validated it — and waited for the spiders to go amok on his site. Before we added the sitemap, he had about 2500 pages in the Google index. The day after submitting the sitemap, he had 12 500 pages indexed! I checked today, one week after we did this, and the indexed pages has now increased to 12 800. Now that’s what I call impressive.
I think many sites have the same problems, so I’m thinking about writing a tutorial on this. It’s really easy to make your own Google sitemap, and as you can see, it may have a huge impact on how many pages on your site gets indexed as well as your SERPs in general.
Sverre Sjøthun
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By SEO Tools and Resources Page » SEO Bomb Blog on 02.03.08 11:51 pm | Permalink
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