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Hopefully you have been enjoying the Webmaster Tools series so far. We are down to the last 2 sections and then I will post up a final overview.
In part 6 we talked about the Links section of Webmaster Tools. Today we will be going over the Sitemaps section.
Sitemaps
For those of you that don’t know, a sitemap is a listing of all of the URLs that are contained within your site. With a sitemap you can let the search engine robots know where the URL is, how often it is going to be updated, and how often it should check that page along with a few other options. But it’s main purpose is to give the robots a map of your site.
Upon landing at the Sitemaps page, you will notice a table with some info in it. Above this table will be some data as well. This data is a quick overview of what information Google is showing about your sitemap.
They are pretty self explanatory, or at least the first one is. Total URLs refers to the total amount of URLs that Google has read in your sitemap. So if everything is working ok, and you have 73 URLs in your sitemap, you should see 73 Total URLs. The second part, Indexed URLs is a little bit trickier.
As you may know, when you search on Google, the listings that are displayed are the pages that Google has contained within their index. Now, don’t get discouraged when you hear this, but even though you provide a sitemap for your site, Google will not always index every single URL. Google determines what they think should show up in the index and if you don’t like it….well you can just go somewhere else as far as Google is concerned.
Usually pages that get traffic to them get indexed so as long as your site is getting traffic, you shouldn’t worry too much about which URLs are indexed. Except if you are wanting a certain page to show up in the search results and it isn’t getting indexed, then you need to check out the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools to see if there is a possible error.
Phew! Ok, so now that we got that out of the way, lets go over the table of information. You will notice the table has 5 columns; Filename, Format, Last Downloaded, Status and URLs submitted.
Filename
This is pretty obvious…the name of your sitemap. You can name it whatever you want, Google does not care as long as you give Google the right filename.
Format
When you first submit your sitemap you can choose from 4 different formats. General Web, Mobile, Code Search and Video formats. Depending on how you coded your site, will depend on which format you choose.
Google has special indexes created for certain formats to ensure that searchers get the most relevant information that is easy to read.
Last Downloaded
When Googlebot last downloaded your sitemap. This should usually be within a day or two, if not, there may be an error.
Status
The status of Googlebot either being able to access your sitemap or not. You want this to say OK ;)
URLs submitted
This is the number of URLs contained within your sitemap file. It is not the number of URLs of your site in the index. If you know how many URLs are on your site and this number is different, you may want to check your sitemap formatting for errors.
The 2 links below this table, Download this table and Download Sitemap details for all of your sites as a .csv file provide further information about your site.
The first, Download this table, gives you the exact information as displayed in the table on the Sitemaps main page, except once again in a .csv format for editing and formatting.
The second, Download Sitemap details for all of your sites as a .csv file does just that. For every site that you have listed under your Webmaster Tools account there will be information listed about it in this file.
This file has 8 columns; Site Information, Filename, Format, Type, Submitted, Last Downloaded, Status and URLs submitted.
Site Information
The domain name of the site
Filename
The filename of the sitemap that you submitted to Google
Format
Once again, depending on your site, you will have to submit a certain sitemap format to Google
Type
The type of sitemap submitted, somewhat related to format
Submitted
When you first submitted the sitemap to Google
Last Downloaded
The last time Googlebot accessed and downloaded your sitemap
Status
Whether or not Googlebot was successful in reading your sitemap
URLs submitted
The number of URLs in your sitemap that Googlebot found, not the number of URLs that Google added to their index
Add Sitemap
Once you have created a sitemap in the correct format, there is where you submit it to Google.
Choose the format of the sitemap file, generally this will be General Web. On the next page is where you enter in the URL of the sitemap so that google can access it. Follow the steps provided by Google, and once you have entered the URL of the sitemap, click Add General Web Sitemap.
Google will do a quick check to make sure it can access the sitemap and will let you know if there was an error. Don’t expect to check back within a minute and expect to show some URLs indexed already. As I said before, it is solely up to Google on which URLs get indexed and it usually doesn’t happen overnight or even within the first few days.
So just be patient and cut Googlebot some slack. Your page isn’t the only one on the net ;)
Well that does it for part 7 of the Google Webmaster Tools series. A quick note, a sitemap is not needed for your site. If your site is coded correctly Googlebot should not have any problem finding its way around your site.
Of course this does not mean that you can’t add one anyways, nothing bad will happen if you do. If you are not sure of the coding for your site, you may want to generate a Google sitemap for your site and submit it just to be sure that Googlebot can find all of your pages.
One more part to go and that will be discussing the Tools section of Webmaster Tools where you can find some advanced features in giving Google extra information about your site.
Part 8 - Using Webmasters Tools Tools
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