AutoMapIt Sitemap Creation Service

AutoMapIt has added a manual tweak page for you to adjust individual pages in your sitemap. This page allows you to adjust the priority level of your pages, how often you change those pages, and whether you want individual pages to be included or not.

The ‘Priority’ of your page is included on your Google sitemap and shows them how your pages relate to the other pages of your site. Google does not use these numbers to compare your site to other websites. Many webmasters try to set all pages to 1.0 in an effort to show Google they are REALLY important and it doesn’t work. My suggestion is to leave your site at a default setting of 0.5 and set your homepage to 1.0 as well as any other MAJOR pages on your site. While being important to your users, pages like ‘contact us’ or ‘Terms of Service’ should be lowered in priority. These are useful pages but they don’t describe your site very well.

The ‘Change Frequency’ lets Google know how often your page is updated. Pages like a blog homepage may be updated as often as ‘daily’ while the individual post pages are basically ‘Never’ updated. Setting your pages change frequencies correctly helps Google to spider your site more efficiently and they seem to appreciate honest answers here.

The final setting we make available is a choice of update time for your page. Many servers do not support finding the last update time remotely. Webmasters with their sites on those servers do not have the option of using the ‘actual’ time for the last-modified date, but we do have the option of using current time or no time at all. If your server supports the last-mod remotely, go ahead and use the real time.

Finally, we allow you to block pages completely. In order to provide the widest support for websites, we allow URLs that end in a “/” and those that don’t. The end result is that most sites end up with a http://www.domain.com and a http://www.domain.com/ in their sitemaps…and don’t forget http://www.domain.com/index.html. Blocking one version of the URL or the other allows you to return to having one version of the page in your sitemaps.

All of these features are on the ‘Tweak Page’ inside your AutoMapIt account and allow for even greater control over your sitemaps.

Tags: Search Engine, google, sitemaps, webmaster

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 at 12:18 am and is filed under Tips and Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.