Sitemap function in BlueVoda

[paulsdunford]

Hi

I have tried to use the sitemap generator in BlueVoda but it does not appear to be working for me for some reason.

The crawler seemed to work OK but found a whole list of links to pages that have not been on my site for two years. These redundant pages have no links to them in my main index page, neither do the pages themselves exist any more in my public_html root folder.

I have followed advice in another section of the forum to create the sitemap using a third party tool, so it isn't critical, but it has me wondering if there's something wrong with the way I have files stored on your server or some other thing in the way I have things structured that may affect my site and search engine efficiency, and whether the sitemap generator issues may have helped identify that I have an issue.

Hard to explain but I hope this makes sense.

Many thanks

Paul

https://www.experttuning.co.uk

[Vasili]

Re: Sitemap function in BlueVoda

Creating Sitemaps independent of BlueVoda is generally the better way to go (such as from www.xml-sitemaps.com), as included in the generated file is the all-important Search Engine "Rule" regarding return crawling request for a more accurate 'updated' cache version of the website --- for instance, you can change the Rule from the defaulted One Month cycle to Weekly if you wish (I suggest monthly for typical websites, and Weekly only for dynamic websites such as Blogs that are updated multiple times weekly by nature).

For whatever reason, it appears you are merely noting an old cached version results (in that it is reporting on Pages and Files no longer present), suggesting that you are needing a more current visit by the Search Engines, and unless you have specific visit Rules in place, it is rather unlikely that you will get them (especially for local SE Hub Domain Extensions, i.e. ".co.uk" and ".co.au" vs. the favored ".com").
This significant SEO-focused differences between Universal and Hub Domain Extensions (".com" vs. ".co.uk" for example) has been discussed previously at great length ....

Of course, it is important to always remember the two Core Rules of Sitemaps:
1. Always create and install a new sitemap after every website update (adding or deleting pages, text, photos, or any other changes);
2. Always manually "inspect" all sitemaps before installing to verify there are no errant mentions, and that all the Rules you require are present (including instructions mirrored in your robots.txt file that should also be present).

[paulsdunford]

Re: Sitemap function in BlueVoda

Many thanks for the reply. Seems like the way to go is the independent route, as you suggest.

I'm going to save the full reply for easy access each time I update.

Much appreciated.

Paul