That is just not true. Sitemaps are *designed* to be compressed - it is part of the spec. There is nothing extraordinary about this, its been being done this way for many, many years. If folks writing search engines do not want to follow the specification of the protocol then they can crawl the site the old-fashioned way.
The reason for any relatively recent problems with Google has to do with the fact we renamed some of the sitemap files themselves - not because of any compressed vs uncompressed thing. The old files are getting red X's because they don't exist and the new ones are being processed just fine. If you scroll back one page on this thread (page 8) you can see the screen shots from Bob_A that show this. If Google was not able to process compressed sitemap files they would not show checkboxes.
If you can find a search engine that supports sitemaps but not compressed ones, let me know, I will be happy to contact them.
Your first link simply goes right back to this thread, so we don't know which post you're wanting us to see. Your second post actually does not support your argument at all. You evidently didn't read enough of that thread... even from reading a few of the posts, I could see that your complaint about the compressed sitemap format is not supported at all in what that thread says. In that example, the OP's problem was not the compression or xml.gz at all-- it was something else. That person even said their site was being crawled (or whatever) just fine. Quote: "...When I go to my reports though it shows success...." Anyway, did you not see Greg's (Twoofy's) post #151 here in this thread? If you look at the sitemaps info., it completely supports what he's telling you about it. I would think sitemaps.org just might be able to be trusted on this, right???!! If you're not going to trust SmugMug, at least trust that.
I checked all 3 of those and they appear to be okay from all the tests I have run. You should have these three showing up (hopefully with no red X's) and anything else should be giving you a 404 error. The 404 error is basically our server saying that the files do not exist anymore, which they do not. It just takes Google a while to realize that it is intentional.
Make sure you have submitted only the sitemap-index.xml.gz file and it should pick these up and eventually the old ones should go away.
- Greg
Hopefully this will be my last (dumb) question for awhile
I deleted all of my sitemaps that I submitted then resubmitted sitemap-index.xml.gz and it gives me a red X. However, I noticed that while there was 1 submission "by me" there is a button that says "all 2". When I click that, sitemap-index.xml shows up. If I then click sitemap-index.xml the three sitemaps you referenced above are displayed.
Does this mean that Google found my sitemap(s) and I shouldn't be submitting manually? Just wondering if the red X for the sitemap-index.xml.gz file is because the resulting sitemaps are already being used.
Hopefully this will be my last (dumb) question for awhile
I deleted all of my sitemaps that I submitted then resubmitted sitemap-index.xml.gz and it gives me a red X. However, I noticed that while there was 1 submission "by me" there is a button that says "all 2". When I click that, sitemap-index.xml shows up. If I then click sitemap-index.xml the three sitemaps you referenced above are displayed.
Does this mean that Google found my sitemap(s) and I shouldn't be submitting manually? Just wondering if the red X for the sitemap-index.xml.gz file is because the resulting sitemaps are already being used.
Yeah, I'd actually pull out sitemap-index.xml.gz and leave it at sitemap-index.xml because that is the one we put in the robots.txt. Its not hurting anything, but its not helping either.
- Greg
P.S. It is a delight to answer your questions, keep them coming if you have any more
In the last 5 days, I've upload a dozen photos, done gallery changes, changed descriptions... What's the expected turn around after having done changes?
Thanks
Just FYI, I believe that your sitemap has been rebuilt - I just checked the queue and do not see it there. Let me know if you are still seeing a problem with it.
ive posted this screen shot again as i didnt get any response last time
But do i need the 2 sitemaps with cross's, what is the reason for the cross's, does it mean the sitemaps or wrong or havent been read yet?
ive posted this screen shot again as i didnt get any response last time
But do i need the 2 sitemaps with cross's, what is the reason for the cross's, does it mean the sitemaps or wrong or havent been read yet?
Oops, sorry I did not see your original message. If you click sitemap-index you should see several sitemaps listed underneath it. The ones with the red X's are okay, those do not exist any more as they have been renamed.
I do see that it says "May 10th" as the last date they were downloaded. You may want to change something on your site (upload a new photo, change a keyword, etc) to trigger a sitemap update if you haven't done that recently. Otherwise it looks like everything is okay - the red X's are expected on those two files and will soon go away.
I am going to try and answer the last 3 posts in one reply. Hopefully this is not too confusing.
The /include one you ya'all see is interesting.. It is not in any of the sitemaps that we are generating - my guess is that there is something linking to it and Google is crawling it from there - but its not sitemap related. 403 is the right error code for this (aka "permission denied").
The 404 on sitemap-index.xml.gz - remove that one if you can. We are include sitemap-index.xml from robots.txt. Feel free to add that in if you want, but its not required - especially for Google. Either one works, but for purposes of consistency if you want to manually add it, using the one that we are specifying in robots.txt probably makes the most sense.
503 on images is a temporary error, Google will retry again later.
The 503's on robots.txt would be concerning if they were more recent. Google refetches robots.txt pretty-much daily and it shows these errors for quite a while before they drop off. These appear to be from almost a month ago.
I tried the URL with the redirect error and I'm not seeing the same thing. My guess it that was transient as well.
Hopefully I covered everything - in summary this all looks reasonably okay - with the exception of the /include thing. We need to figure out what URL is linking to that, but its not anything in the sitemaps as far as I can tell.
Thanks Greg,
I guess we will just have to wait and see if the 403 /include error goes away.
--Shawn
I am going to try and figure out whats linking to it - it is not right. And I am guessing that there is a log somewhere showing this and the http referrer that sent it there. It isn't hurting anything on the crawling/indexing side, but whatever is linking to it shouldn't be.
[...]but let me ask you: if you had to trade the number of results indexed in Google's primary index for images, would that be preferable? I haven't done any research to see if this is even what might be going on, but I'm curious what your thoughts would be on that.
- Greg
Greg, I'm just getting caught up on this thread (sitemaps). I've got quite a bit of experience with sitemaps and SEO, etc... My experience is that indexed images can generate much more traffic to a web site than an indexed page does. My vote is to allow both! Let the Google Image Bot index as much as they want!
I would not say it is "the" issue, but if right-click protection is turned on there is no way that Google will be able to grab your images. I was surprised to discover this too, to be honest
- Greg
I'm quite sure that Google does not grab images. What they do is index the URL to the image itself and then they display those images in the search engine results page.
For example, do a search for "miracle on ice team" (without quotes) and look at the urls displayed for the images. These images are not on a google server. It might look like they are because the link that goes to each image begins with "http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=", but this is most likely done so that Google can record the click on the image before they take users to the location where the image lives.
If you click on an image in a Google search page, you'll be taken to the web site where the image lives (the address bar will still start with "http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=", but if you right click on the image itself, you'll see that it is located on the domain where it is hosted.
There's really no reason for Google to grab images unless they were placing them on their servers. I personally don't think that enabling the right click setting has any impact on Google's ability to index an image url...
Andy, honestly there is one more important piece for everyone to remember. If you really want Google to keep up with changes you make to your site (adding images, etc..), be sure to re-submit your sitemap after you've made major updates (added several images, new galleries, etc.. - once a day max.
I don't think SmugMug is doing this automatically, (although they really should... for sites where changes like these are made).
Not only will this help Google locate new images, urls, etc.. It also let's them know that you are constantly updating your web site. This can have a positive impact to search rankings.
You put the appropriate meta tag in the head section of the advanced customization. Smugmug will then include that on every page on your site and Google will then believe that you own that domain.
Yes, and everyone should do the same for Yahoo and Bing as well. Just do a search for Yahoo Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools and you'll find the right place to do this.
Seems like my questions was missed around renaming images having no effect on the sitemap or the name of the image on the site... does anyone have any thoughts?
When you change an image name, it breaks the link that Google has indexed for the original image URL. This is bad. Ideally, what should be done is a 301 redirect to the new URL for the image that was renamed. I don't think SmugMug does this, so the best option right now is to NOT rename your images.
In Google's eyes, and image or page name that has been renamed is a broken link. Ideally, waht should be done is to create a 301 Redirect to the new URL. Google takes this information and updates their search index with it. Without a 301 redirect, Google sees the old URL as a broken link. They won't know you've renamed an image or page URL, so your broken link will sit there for a long time until Google removes it from their index.
Your new image name will likely get indexed before the old one is removed by Google...
I see the same data you are and checked our queue - I see your site in the queue to be processed. Right now there are a quite a few entries in the queue. [...]
- Greg
Greg,
Does SmugMug re-submit those updated sitemaps to Google, Bing and Yahoo? Or are you only updating the sitemap for their next visit?
This is the error for both of them. Note that they've been working fine for almost a year.
General HTTP error: 404 not found
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.
HTTP Error: 404
Problem detected on: May 18, 2011
Bob, also... occasionally Google has their own issues as well. I would resubmit your sitemap, wait a few days (preferably a week) and see if these clear up before taking any other action.
Does SmugMug re-submit those updated sitemaps to Google, Bing and Yahoo? Or are you only updating the sitemap for their next visit?
We do not resubmit them automatically, but the system is designed to work reasonably without it (though I do agree it is sometimes helpful to resubmit if things are taking too long or if you've made lots of changes). Google re-crawls the robots.txt daily (though that is unlikely to change). Referenced therein is the link to sitemap-index.xml, which it probably does crawl a little less frequently, though I really do not have any specific metrics on that it seems nearly as frequently as robots.txt. I imagine Google has pretty sophisticated algorithms to measure how frequently things change and may back off on that rate for sites that change rarely.
Once Google has crawled the sitemap-index.xml everything is fine because in there we list each individual sitemap file with the last date something has changed within it (which is why you probably hear us saying so much to add/change/delete something about a gallery) - if its changed Google will crawl it nearly immediately and usually the pages within an hour or two. But, then it does take some time for that to work its way into Google's index.
I'm quite sure that Google does not grab images. What they do is index the URL to the image itself and then they display those images in the search engine results page.
Naah, I just took one of my servers down to test it. I was still able to right-click save the image from Google:
Since I see you are browsing the forums I will leave my server down for the next 20 or so minutes so you can see the difference. The "background page" (the one containing the image) does not show up - but that image is being served up from Google.
Oh, I forgot one more thing that makes this problematic. Say you have a website that shows an image with a link pointing to a specific image in one of your galleries, a visitor to SmugMug would not be able to right-click save it (if you have enabled that option), but on your other site they would be able to. Even for cases where Google is showing an image linked to from a remote site it is still possible to right-click save it. Or at least it was, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google has made that a bit more difficult with a recent update.
Hope this makes sense, if not let me know and I'll elaborate more.
I keep returning to this thread to try and understand more about what is going on with sitemaps, but I'm not getting any clearer about ti.
I have some questions:-
Where do I find my site map?
How can I or you check that everything is OK with it?
How do I actually re-submit it?
If there is something wrong what should I do?
That's cutting it right down to the basics. I do understand that Smugmug periodically resubmits but gather it is desirable to do this more frequently.
If you open that up you will then see a few other files with a .gz extension. You can download those and open them with an unzipping program. However that is the difficult way to do it
What most people do is to sign up with Google Webmaster Tools. They will then give you a special 'code' that they want you to add to your site e.g. UA-851248-9. You put that in your Control Panel, Settings, Google Analytics box. Google will then know that you own the site. Then, in Google Webmaster Tools, on the left hand menu you can click on 'Site Configuration' then 'Sitemaps' to see your sitemap. If you double click on the sitemap you will see the 'sub files' that I mentioned earlier. That page will also tell you how many of those images it has in its index. Be careful here though as I believe that number refers to web search and not image search but I may be wrong.
>How can I or you check that everything is OK with it?
In webmaster tools there will be a happy green tick mark beside the file if it is happy with it and a red X if they aren't
>How do I actually re-submit it?
In webmaster tools there is a 'resubmit' button beside each file. It also tells you the date that Google last read the file. The last time ours was read was the 29th of May. That doesn't mean the Smugmug resubmitted it then - just that the 29th was the late date that Google read that file as it checks them regularly.
>If there is something wrong what should I do?
I would check here first. The file is generated by Smugmug so if there is a problem then someone has probably already spotted it and it is being worked on. That is certainly what I have found
I keep returning to this thread to try and understand more about what is going on with sitemaps, but I'm not getting any clearer about ti.
I have some questions:-
Where do I find my site map?
How can I or you check that everything is OK with it?
How do I actually re-submit it?
If there is something wrong what should I do?
That's cutting it right down to the basics. I do understand that Smugmug periodically resubmits but gather it is desirable to do this more frequently.
Once you setup your login and accounts, you can go to these three sites to see if there are issues with your sitemap. They may show issues immediately, but you have to give it a day or two to make sure.
You can resubmit your sitemap to each search engine by logging into each site and then go to their respective sitemap submit tool.
If there is something wrong I would imagine that you should contact SmugMug directly, although occasionally you will find that Google (for example) will display an error one day, but then it goes away within the next day or two. Google does not have a perfect system, but if an error shows up, you should really give it a day or two to see if it goes away before contacting SmugMug.
Looks like I already had a code in my control panel and I have a Google Webmaster account - had forgotten about this completely
However I have a big fat red X and the following comments:-
Line Status Details - General HTTP error: 404 not found
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. HTTP Error: 404
Problem detected on: May 30, 2011 - Empty Sitemap
Your Sitemap does not contain any URLs. Please validate and resubmit your Sitemap. Problem detected on: Jul 25, 2010
Could you check something first please. When you click on Sitemaps on the left, the right hand half of the window will show your sitemaps. At the far right hand side of that window it will say 'Show Submissions: By me(_) - All(_)'. Can you click on 'All' and see what you get?
The reason I ask is that the SmugMug file normally appears under the 'All' link because they submit the sitemap using the robots.txt file. Anything that you submitted last year will appear under the 'by me' link. I think something happened with the sitemaps at some point last year so the file that you submitted may no longer be available.
If that was the problem then just delete the file in the 'By me' section - you don't need it. The one in the 'All' section is what you need.
As for sitemap-index.xml, we need to go one level deeper: what do you see when you click sitemap-index.xml? You can either paste a screenshow or just tell post what the error and the date is.
You can (should) delete the sitemap.xml one - Done
As for sitemap-index.xml, we need to go one level deeper: what do you see when you click sitemap-index.xml? You can either paste a screenshow or just tell post what the error and the date is.
Comments
That is just not true. Sitemaps are *designed* to be compressed - it is part of the spec. There is nothing extraordinary about this, its been being done this way for many, many years. If folks writing search engines do not want to follow the specification of the protocol then they can crawl the site the old-fashioned way.
The reason for any relatively recent problems with Google has to do with the fact we renamed some of the sitemap files themselves - not because of any compressed vs uncompressed thing. The old files are getting red X's because they don't exist and the new ones are being processed just fine. If you scroll back one page on this thread (page 8) you can see the screen shots from Bob_A that show this. If Google was not able to process compressed sitemap files they would not show checkboxes.
If you can find a search engine that supports sitemaps but not compressed ones, let me know, I will be happy to contact them.
- Greg
DayBreak, my Folk Music Group (some free mp3s!) http://daybreakfolk.com
Hopefully this will be my last (dumb) question for awhile
I deleted all of my sitemaps that I submitted then resubmitted sitemap-index.xml.gz and it gives me a red X. However, I noticed that while there was 1 submission "by me" there is a button that says "all 2". When I click that, sitemap-index.xml shows up. If I then click sitemap-index.xml the three sitemaps you referenced above are displayed.
Does this mean that Google found my sitemap(s) and I shouldn't be submitting manually? Just wondering if the red X for the sitemap-index.xml.gz file is because the resulting sitemaps are already being used.
My Legacy SmugMug Site (not ready to migrate yet)
Yeah, I'd actually pull out sitemap-index.xml.gz and leave it at sitemap-index.xml because that is the one we put in the robots.txt. Its not hurting anything, but its not helping either.
- Greg
P.S. It is a delight to answer your questions, keep them coming if you have any more
Just FYI, I believe that your sitemap has been rebuilt - I just checked the queue and do not see it there. Let me know if you are still seeing a problem with it.
- Greg
But do i need the 2 sitemaps with cross's, what is the reason for the cross's, does it mean the sitemaps or wrong or havent been read yet?
Oops, sorry I did not see your original message. If you click sitemap-index you should see several sitemaps listed underneath it. The ones with the red X's are okay, those do not exist any more as they have been renamed.
I do see that it says "May 10th" as the last date they were downloaded. You may want to change something on your site (upload a new photo, change a keyword, etc) to trigger a sitemap update if you haven't done that recently. Otherwise it looks like everything is okay - the red X's are expected on those two files and will soon go away.
- Greg
Webmaster Tools is reporting the following crawl errors:
HTTP (1)
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/include/ 403 error May 7, 2011
In Sitemaps (2)
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/Vacation/Victoria-BC-Canada-2010/13260249_UsL9A/1/963005065_zJwiS 503 error unavailable Apr 19, 2011
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/keyword/fire truck 503 error unavailable Apr 18, 2011
Not followed (1)
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/Other/Photos-for-posting-on-POTN/5098399_RjKZu/1/309537646_WDqai/Small Redirect error May 10, 2011
Not found (1)
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/sitemap-index.xml.gz 404 (Not found)
19 pages May 22, 2011
Unreachable (5)
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/Vacation/Victoria-BC-Canada-2010/13260249_UsL9A/1/963005065_zJwiS 503 error Apr 19, 2011
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=recentVideos&Data=bobanderson&format=kml20 503 error Apr 19, 2011
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/keyword/fire truck 503 error Apr 18, 2011
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/Museums/Drumheller-HooDoos-and-Museum/943002_72Gce/2/246096807_FJevW robots.txt unreachable Apr 15, 2011
http://bobanderson.smugmug.com/Museums/Drumheller-HooDoos-and-Museum/943002_72Gce/2/246096160_WHv9w robots.txt unreachable Apr 15, 2011
I'm also getting a bunch for "Restricted by Robots.txt (131)", but these I'd expect.
Do I need to be concerned about any of the above, and if so how do I correct the errors?
My Legacy SmugMug Site (not ready to migrate yet)
http://www.onfirephotography.com/include/ dont know what it means though
The /include one you ya'all see is interesting.. It is not in any of the sitemaps that we are generating - my guess is that there is something linking to it and Google is crawling it from there - but its not sitemap related. 403 is the right error code for this (aka "permission denied").
The 404 on sitemap-index.xml.gz - remove that one if you can. We are include sitemap-index.xml from robots.txt. Feel free to add that in if you want, but its not required - especially for Google. Either one works, but for purposes of consistency if you want to manually add it, using the one that we are specifying in robots.txt probably makes the most sense.
503 on images is a temporary error, Google will retry again later.
The 503's on robots.txt would be concerning if they were more recent. Google refetches robots.txt pretty-much daily and it shows these errors for quite a while before they drop off. These appear to be from almost a month ago.
I tried the URL with the redirect error and I'm not seeing the same thing. My guess it that was transient as well.
Hopefully I covered everything - in summary this all looks reasonably okay - with the exception of the /include thing. We need to figure out what URL is linking to that, but its not anything in the sitemaps as far as I can tell.
- Greg
I am going to try and figure out whats linking to it - it is not right. And I am guessing that there is a log somewhere showing this and the http referrer that sent it there. It isn't hurting anything on the crawling/indexing side, but whatever is linking to it shouldn't be.
- Greg
My Legacy SmugMug Site (not ready to migrate yet)
For example, do a search for "miracle on ice team" (without quotes) and look at the urls displayed for the images. These images are not on a google server. It might look like they are because the link that goes to each image begins with "http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=", but this is most likely done so that Google can record the click on the image before they take users to the location where the image lives.
If you click on an image in a Google search page, you'll be taken to the web site where the image lives (the address bar will still start with "http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=", but if you right click on the image itself, you'll see that it is located on the domain where it is hosted.
There's really no reason for Google to grab images unless they were placing them on their servers. I personally don't think that enabling the right click setting has any impact on Google's ability to index an image url...
Andy, honestly there is one more important piece for everyone to remember. If you really want Google to keep up with changes you make to your site (adding images, etc..), be sure to re-submit your sitemap after you've made major updates (added several images, new galleries, etc.. - once a day max.
I don't think SmugMug is doing this automatically, (although they really should... for sites where changes like these are made).
Not only will this help Google locate new images, urls, etc.. It also let's them know that you are constantly updating your web site. This can have a positive impact to search rankings.
Yes, and everyone should do the same for Yahoo and Bing as well. Just do a search for Yahoo Webmaster Tools or Bing Webmaster Tools and you'll find the right place to do this.
When you change an image name, it breaks the link that Google has indexed for the original image URL. This is bad. Ideally, what should be done is a 301 redirect to the new URL for the image that was renamed. I don't think SmugMug does this, so the best option right now is to NOT rename your images.
In Google's eyes, and image or page name that has been renamed is a broken link. Ideally, waht should be done is to create a 301 Redirect to the new URL. Google takes this information and updates their search index with it. Without a 301 redirect, Google sees the old URL as a broken link. They won't know you've renamed an image or page URL, so your broken link will sit there for a long time until Google removes it from their index.
Your new image name will likely get indexed before the old one is removed by Google...
Does SmugMug re-submit those updated sitemaps to Google, Bing and Yahoo? Or are you only updating the sitemap for their next visit?
We do not resubmit them automatically, but the system is designed to work reasonably without it (though I do agree it is sometimes helpful to resubmit if things are taking too long or if you've made lots of changes). Google re-crawls the robots.txt daily (though that is unlikely to change). Referenced therein is the link to sitemap-index.xml, which it probably does crawl a little less frequently, though I really do not have any specific metrics on that it seems nearly as frequently as robots.txt. I imagine Google has pretty sophisticated algorithms to measure how frequently things change and may back off on that rate for sites that change rarely.
Once Google has crawled the sitemap-index.xml everything is fine because in there we list each individual sitemap file with the last date something has changed within it (which is why you probably hear us saying so much to add/change/delete something about a gallery) - if its changed Google will crawl it nearly immediately and usually the pages within an hour or two. But, then it does take some time for that to work its way into Google's index.
- Greg
Naah, I just took one of my servers down to test it. I was still able to right-click save the image from Google:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.net-virtual.com/pics/halloween/2006/s4024950.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.net-virtual.com/pics/halloween/2006/&usg=__hDchRgs9UMcA9NCSP4RDTi7lBUI=&h=480&w=640&sz=61&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=vPm2x-vlIOHAOM:&tbnh=147&tbnw=150&ei=NuXiTemAMKrbiAL4mJncBg&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dnet-virtual.com%2Bhalloween%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26biw%3D1376%26bih%3D844%26gbv%3D2%26tbm%3Disch&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=533&vpy=554&dur=665&hovh=152&hovw=161&tx=122&ty=219&page=1&ndsp=25&ved=1t:429,r:21,s:0&biw=1376&bih=844
Since I see you are browsing the forums I will leave my server down for the next 20 or so minutes so you can see the difference. The "background page" (the one containing the image) does not show up - but that image is being served up from Google.
Edit: I kinda want to bring my server back up, so here is the link to the image Google is serving up: http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSPHmfJPssRz0aS4XrNyAzlsPmltxY7Szc2EVg3cyMWpTpWN49_sw&t=1 gstatic.com is a Google owned domain name.
Oh, I forgot one more thing that makes this problematic. Say you have a website that shows an image with a link pointing to a specific image in one of your galleries, a visitor to SmugMug would not be able to right-click save it (if you have enabled that option), but on your other site they would be able to. Even for cases where Google is showing an image linked to from a remote site it is still possible to right-click save it. Or at least it was, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google has made that a bit more difficult with a recent update.
Hope this makes sense, if not let me know and I'll elaborate more.
- Greg
I have some questions:-
Where do I find my site map?
How can I or you check that everything is OK with it?
How do I actually re-submit it?
If there is something wrong what should I do?
That's cutting it right down to the basics. I do understand that Smugmug periodically resubmits but gather it is desirable to do this more frequently.
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
[/URL]
I can't answer all of them but I'll tell you what I know (or believe that I know). Maybe a Smuggie can chip in with the rest
>Where do I find my site map?
It's at the very top of your site and is called sitemap-index.xml. So for you it is at http://www.carolineshipsey.co.uk/sitemap-index.xml
If you open that up you will then see a few other files with a .gz extension. You can download those and open them with an unzipping program. However that is the difficult way to do it
What most people do is to sign up with Google Webmaster Tools. They will then give you a special 'code' that they want you to add to your site e.g. UA-851248-9. You put that in your Control Panel, Settings, Google Analytics box. Google will then know that you own the site. Then, in Google Webmaster Tools, on the left hand menu you can click on 'Site Configuration' then 'Sitemaps' to see your sitemap. If you double click on the sitemap you will see the 'sub files' that I mentioned earlier. That page will also tell you how many of those images it has in its index. Be careful here though as I believe that number refers to web search and not image search but I may be wrong.
>How can I or you check that everything is OK with it?
In webmaster tools there will be a happy green tick mark beside the file if it is happy with it and a red X if they aren't
>How do I actually re-submit it?
In webmaster tools there is a 'resubmit' button beside each file. It also tells you the date that Google last read the file. The last time ours was read was the 29th of May. That doesn't mean the Smugmug resubmitted it then - just that the 29th was the late date that Google read that file as it checks them regularly.
>If there is something wrong what should I do?
I would check here first. The file is generated by Smugmug so if there is a problem then someone has probably already spotted it and it is being worked on. That is certainly what I have found
Good luck
Rich
Caroline,
I've seen this question asked before without an answer, so I'll just go ahead and help. Your sitemap file is located at:
www.[yourdomainname].com/sitemap-index.xml
So if your smugmug domain name is www.carolinesphotos.com, then your sitemap would be located at www.carolinesphotos.com/sitemap-index.xml.
In order to check that it is working okay, you'd need to setup a webmaster account with Google, Yahoo, Bing. You can do this at the following locations:
For Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
For Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
For Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/
Once you setup your login and accounts, you can go to these three sites to see if there are issues with your sitemap. They may show issues immediately, but you have to give it a day or two to make sure.
You can resubmit your sitemap to each search engine by logging into each site and then go to their respective sitemap submit tool.
If there is something wrong I would imagine that you should contact SmugMug directly, although occasionally you will find that Google (for example) will display an error one day, but then it goes away within the next day or two. Google does not have a perfect system, but if an error shows up, you should really give it a day or two to see if it goes away before contacting SmugMug.
Looks like I already had a code in my control panel and I have a Google Webmaster account - had forgotten about this completely
However I have a big fat red X and the following comments:-
Line Status Details
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. HTTP Error: 404
Problem detected on: May 30, 2011
Your Sitemap does not contain any URLs. Please validate and resubmit your Sitemap. Problem detected on: Jul 25, 2010
What next guys?
Thanks very much for your help:)
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
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Hi Caroline,
Could you check something first please. When you click on Sitemaps on the left, the right hand half of the window will show your sitemaps. At the far right hand side of that window it will say 'Show Submissions: By me(_) - All(_)'. Can you click on 'All' and see what you get?
The reason I ask is that the SmugMug file normally appears under the 'All' link because they submit the sitemap using the robots.txt file. Anything that you submitted last year will appear under the 'by me' link. I think something happened with the sitemaps at some point last year so the file that you submitted may no longer be available.
If that was the problem then just delete the file in the 'By me' section - you don't need it. The one in the 'All' section is what you need.
If it isn't that then I don't know - sorry
Rich
It also only returns links to my site to associated keywords and not the proper galleries? If i search for Onfirephotography in google it returns results such as this www.onfirephotography.com/keyword/.../1/1232962755_k4kLi
This is what I see
sitemap.jpg
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
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As for sitemap-index.xml, we need to go one level deeper: what do you see when you click sitemap-index.xml? You can either paste a screenshow or just tell post what the error and the date is.
- Greg[/QUOTE]
sitemap.jpg
Thanks for taking a look Greg.
Caroline
www.carolineshipsey.co.uk - Follow me on G+
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