Google Sitemap boardsie?

aidan_walsh

Heres a suggestion for when (uh, if) things break again. How about when you are transferring the software over to the new servers, you add a mechanism for Google Sitemap.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.

There are pretty good instructions on the Sitemap homepage, and since I am guessing that Python isn't on the server (Google's scripting language of choice), there are a couple of other mechanisms that could also work, including third party tools for vBulletin [1] [2].

This would be a great benefit in helping make Google searches of boards much more relevant, and up to date, as Sitemapped sites are checked more regularily that random spidering.

mneylon

No need to use python. there's a vbulletin plugin that will do the entire thing automagically

Talliesin

aidan_walsh wrote:

This would be a great benefit in helping make Google searches of boards much more relevant, and up to date, as Sitemapped sites are checked more regularily that random spidering.

Got any evidence to suggest that?

From what I can see they can help get pages in quickly on low-ranking sites that aren't hit much (especially brand new sites) but they don't seem to have much benefit on speed of spidering otherwise.

I would put it in the "well, it can't hurt" category though, so we might as well do it.

Trojan

aidan_walsh wrote:

Sitemapped sites are checked more regularily that random spidering.

I'm not sure about that one...

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html#sitemapOverview

aidan_walsh

Only two years to get a reply? Completely forgotten about this...

I had been under the impression that maps were designed to be able to open up an entire site, as opposed to just what the crawler finds from following link to link. It appears that I was incorrect.