I just switch to vs 7 and I am surprised sitemaps are still ignored considering how important submitting a site to Google and Yahoo is. A sitemap seems to be a basic function of a sites backend.

What makes it worse is (if I am understanding it correctly) Network Solutions won't allow third party applications access to the backend of the site for automatic submissions.

I understand the hesitation to allow anything into the backend, but I don't understand how sitemaps are not considered a basic component of our sites?

If Network Solution is going to ignore the value of an itegrated sitemap generator/submitter then why not offer a clearer recommendation of a 3rd party option with detailled instructions on exectuting it?

Yah it's kinda lame. I'm suing CoffeeCup Google Sitemapper. ( http://www.coffeecup.com/google-sitemapper/ ) You have to add a few exceptions or it will crawl forever, this is what i did. Files to ignore.

http://yoursite.com/search.aspx
http://yoursite.com/login.aspx
http://yoursite.com/email-a-friend.aspx
http://yoursite.com/send-password.aspx


Oops and forgot these, in the "Queries to Ignore" Just add

page=
product=


The rest should crawl fine.

Now im getting nothing indexed though hehe. For some reason im getting an error when submitting a sitemap.

When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted

HTTP ERROR: 301 (Moved permanently)

No clue what this is all about. (IMG:http://forums.networksolutions.com/style_emoticons/default/sad.gif)

We actually have a sitemap that's automatically generated. Just go to www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.aspx. The templates all link to that page as well. That page works really well for both Google and Yahoo.

We also recently rolled out a beta version of an XML sitemap, but it hasn't officially been announced yet. Simply type in www.yourdomain.com/xml-sitemap.ashx. As this is a brand new piece of functionality, let us know what you like/don't like about it. We'll make some more improvements to it before we "officially" roll it out.

I've actually seen the sitemap url? Your saying that you can submit that to googlebase and it will crawl it?

Also that url you gave is awesome! Is that currently working and indexing the entire site or just a sample as you guys test? Thanks.

Currently working and indexing the live site.

Known issues with it:
The date/timestamps are in a strange format
The update frequency is set to always

These will both make Google complain at you, but just with warnings, and are both fixed in the next release.

As far as Google base, we have feeds for that. Operations > Product Feeds.

Oops didn't mean googlebase, I meant webmaster sitemap tools.

Well that both is good news and proves me wrong. I'll try it out.

I tried to upload the sitemap at Google Webtools as a general website sitemap using:
http://furlongspetsupply.com/xml-sitemap.ashx

and recived the following error:
General HTTP error: HTTP 400 error (Bad request)
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.

Your sitemap is accessible at that URL, so I'm not sure what would cause that error. I'll look into it.

I just checked my live production site and Google was able to access and read that sitemap just 58 minutes ago. Check to make sure that they are accessing the correct sitemap on your site by clicking on your developer tools, then click on the sitemap and it will show you exactly which page it is trying to access.

Enter the URL as xml-sitemap.ashx not http://yourdomain.com/xml-sitemap.ashx

They put the front on for you.

Thanks (you also Eddie), I'll try that.