Heroes can't regenerate a sitemap?

webboy634 · January 9, 2016

"As was mentioned before there is no action that we as heroes can take to update or regenerate your sitemap."

This is amazing to me. My sitemap is stuck at:
<lastmod>2015-12-21T00:19:47-08:00</lastmod>

The "heroes" are telling me they can't regenerate it. They can't control their own website??

leftquark · January 10, 2016

The sitemap gets automatically queued for update on a number of actions, including things like uploading, creating new pages, etc. It does go into a queue and can take some time to update, though several weeks sounds strange to me. Can you please link your site so I can take a peak?

leftquark · January 10, 2016

We only update SiteMaps every so often, since there are a number of actions that trigger the need to update it, and we'd be stuck generating site maps infinitely if we did it immediately (for example, we want to want until all the photos from a gallery have been uploaded, since people tend to upload a full gallery all at once). It looks like we updated it last on 12/30/2015, and you could trigger an update by creating a new page or uploading another photo.

The sitemap serves two main purposes:
1) It saves search engines time crawling a page that hasn’t changed, since we timestamp each page’s last changes,
2) If your site has enough external linking that the search engin belives the site is interesting, it helps the search bot crawl every corner of the site.

Most of us, however, don't rank high enough on google for #2 to happen in reality, which is a bummer, but from the search engine's perspective, prevents them from getting bloated by links that have no search importance (according to them)

There are other purposes, however, those are the main 2.

As always, the best way to get search engines to crawl the site is by getting a bunch of external links to your page.

Ferguson · January 10, 2016

leftquark wrote: »

As always, the best way to get search engines to crawl the site is by getting a bunch of external links to your page.

What's a page in that regard?

Is linking to an image (not in lightbox but the image) "interesting" in that regard?

Is linking to a gallery interesting in that regard? A folder? Does it matter?

leftquark · January 10, 2016

In some ways it doesn't matter, and in other ways it does. It does matter in the context of your site. Search engines will see all links that are loaded with whatever it's looking at. If you've linked straight to an image (directly to the JPG), then there's no links for the search engine to crawl. If you link to it in SM style, which is one of the styles that has a non-LB link to the image, it'll see most of the other images in the gallery, and it'll see the gallery, so they all get some search engine "value". The LB loads on top of the gallery, so they should be to give everything "value" when linked in the LB as well. Of course, the direct link always gets the highest value they'll assign, and all those other links it sees get slightly less value (hey, you linked me to , so is the most important while are great, but not as great as , which you linked me.

bcruver · February 23, 2016

Just a FYI, after some back and forth with the Support Heros I found out that even though you have these triggering events, the rebuild of the sitemap file can take up to 7 days. That was surprising it took that long but at least I understand how it works.

Heroes can't regenerate a sitemap?

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