Google and sitemaps

[hawkman]

Google doesn't give a rat's *** about sitemaps, it seems. My sitemap has

<loc>http://www.file-portal.net/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-12-13</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>

in it, but the most recent snapshot is 5 days old. Not to mention that pages in my site are even one month old.

[hooperman]

You can see what Google has to say about the <changefreq> tag here

Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command

[stymiee]

Don't have high expectations for xml sitemaps. They offer the search engines another way to find your pages but it won't motivate them to do anything differently. They'll come around and crawl your pages, and index them as well, the same as if they found your pages through HTML links.

[hawkman]

Don't have high expectations for xml sitemaps. They offer the search engines another way to find your pages but it won't motivate them to do anything differently. They'll come around and crawl your pages, and index them as well, the same as if they found your pages through HTML links.

Yeah, well, in that case it is just something done half-a****. What's the point of putting in all that work in order to implement that system if you're not going to take it seriously.

[stymiee]

Yeah, well, in that case it is just something done half-a****. What's the point of putting in all that work in order to implement that system if you're not going to take it seriously.

Because it isn't meant to help every website. It is specifically designed for sites that have content that may not be found by search normally because they use inaccessible navigational structures on their website (i.e. javascript or flash menus). Most websites have absolutely no need for an XML sitemap.