Sitemap

I have a new 70 page site that has been submitted to Google. My question is - should the link to my sitemap only appear on the home page or can I put the sitemap link on every page?

It would seem to me that if the sitemap link was on every page all 70 pages would be crosslinked by the sitemap. When the bot visited each page it would go deep into the sitemap and all pages should show 69 internal backlinks instead of just the home page showing 69 internal backlinks?

Is my thinking flawed?

asia

I'm curious on the answer to your question. My site has a link to sitemap on all 2000+ pages as well - any advice out there woud be great! 8)

thanks

I highly recomend to have it on everypage, The question is, don't you want all your pages indexed? If the answer is YES then, it should be as visible as it can be.

Also I would sugget to use all the links as text links and if possible keyword rich.

Hope this helps

i feel thesitemap link should be on every page. I have found that my site got better spidered after i did that . but i can't exactly pin ploint it to that only . As i did some other optimizations too .

I agree. My own experience is that Google loves SiteMaps. Also, Google's own guidelines put Sitemaps high on their list at:
http://www.google.ch/webmasters/guidelines.html

Every one of my pages links to my sitemap page.
As to the SiteMap page itself, I seem to get better s/e indexing results by keeping the sitemap page very simple, and including a description of each page and its keywords in addition to a link to each page.

I thank you for all the advice and I just wasn't sure if the sitemap was a good thing on every page, I'll just keep mine where it is.

Just another question if you don't mind?

On my sitemap it has all the links to the pages and not to every product, however would my url be too long for the spiders/crawlers for the sitemap?


http://www.site.com/SubCat.pasp?txtCatalog=Retail&txtCategory=Pasta

these are from what I can gather are generated pages.

Thanks

If I understand your second question correctly, you would add the URL above to your sitemap.

From everything I've read on this forum you don't want to have your URL, if it's going to be crawled, to contain more than 2 variables I believe yours has 4. So adding it to the site map would be the best way to be sure it gets crawled because it doesn't have to follow the other variables just the link from the sitemap.

Here's a great post that goes into a little more detail - http://www.seochat.com/viewtopic.php?t=1026

Hope that helps,
Laura

wirelesscove wrote:

Thanks for the advice, I would need to somehow change the url so it doesn't contain 4 variables, it is indeed generated pages and for me not being an expert in programming I'll just have to find a way to shorten the url. Also it would be impossible to list all 2000+ products (everyday some gets deleted and new products gets added) to the sitemap unless I can find a robot to do it...lol

I've read in this forum that long url's should be placed as static links pointing to the actual page and I have no clue exactly what that means to do when the site is completely generated. So I'm back to finding more answers....

Thanks
lilbit

I think you could make a query that lists each url indivudually then put that on the site map. I'm not exactly sure what code your using since your site is not listed in your profile but it shouldn't be to hard and it would give you a Dynamic Site Map that the spiders can follow. I've done something similar at wirelesscove.com/sitemap.cfm. I'm sure if you tell us what language your using someone here would be more than happy to help.

Ok bare with me if I can explain this correctly, the site is using commerce 2000 and from what I see the code is asp, com objects xsl and xml. I believe the asp is calling the com objects from the asp page and generates the pages using xsl/xml then displays the page in .pasp...I don't think this sounds right, let me know if I missed something, like I said I am not an expert in this.

Thanks again

lilbit

forgot to list the url

www.gourmetfood4u.com