Google SitemapAdmin

[Woodymon]

If I go in and edit my
http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapproducts.xml

but if i go to:
http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapproducts.xml

I dont see any links....

The URL's above are exactly the same. I am totally lost on what you trying to say here.

What do you mean when you say you click on the next link?

Note the generated xml files are not intended for you or anyone else to open/view or navigate in a browser.

They are for Google software to scan. ;-)

Generate the files, ping Google, then log into your Webmasters account the next day to see the results.

I suggest you log into your Google Webmasters account and review the basic help documentation ;-)

Woody

[milobloom]

Boy am i confused. Are you not supposed to see the paths for the sitemaps???
When I go to my other site, and click this url:

http://www.allforyourwedding.com/~no...approducts.xml

It comes up with this page with many links on it (1269 i think). As shown here:

Google Sitemap http://www.allforyourwedding.com/~no...approducts.xml
Number of URLs in this Google Sitemap: 1269

When I go to my other site's googlesitemaps - As shown here:

http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/googlesitemap.php

It says that it generated 1760 records. S per below:

Processing file: /home/nothingb/public_html/sitemapproducts.xml OK! Written 1760 records, 369850 bytes
Generated Google Product Sitemap Successfully - http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapproducts.xml

But when I click on the same one as the other site:

http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapproducts.xml

I dont see any paths....

Google Sitemap http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapcategories.xml
Number of sitemaps in this Google sitemap index: 0

And the strange thing is if I edit

http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapproducts.xml

In my ftp editor, I see all the links are in the file. Am I waiting for something to happen before they appear by clicking on: ??

http://www.nothingbutcostumes.com/sitemapproducts.xml

If so then I guess I did everything right... I just thought I would see something there.


Milo

[Woodymon]

Boy am i confused. Are you not supposed to see the paths for the sitemaps???

Could be you have employed GSM mod in Zen Cart running on a subdomain? So the directory where the xml files are written is not the directory you think they are being written.

I would not recommend posting the FULL paths for publicly accessible/writable directories in a public forum.

Woody

[milobloom]

Ok.

If that was the case... Then does it mean my sitemap works?
Well actually I just checked google and it did...
Wanted to see if I can submit it to Yahoo.

[onlyrey]

Can these submissions be included in the sitemap admin?:

Ask.com:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?site...ur_sitemap.xml

LiveSearch (aka Live.com, MSN, Microsoft):
only autodiscovery using robots.txt with the following text:
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>
(explained here: http://livesearch.spaces.live.com/bl...138!1299.entry)

[dbabbage]

When I create the sitemap I get messages telling me that four pages have been successfully created. However, when I try to view the sitemapezpages.xml, I get the following error:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: (the URL location)
Line Number 8, Column 49: <loc>http://siteurl.com/page.html?chapter=1&id=1</loc>

It is objecting to the second parameter passed to the page, appearing to get stuck on the second = sign. Is anyone else having this problem? What on earth can I do to fix it?

I am currently getting around this problem by turning off the ez-pages while I create the sitemapindex, then turning them back off again. This prevents them from appearing in the Google sitemap, but at least removes the error which seemed to be stopping Google from crawling the site at all...

[nigelt74]

Can these submissions be included in the sitemap admin?:

Ask.com:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?site...ur_sitemap.xml

exactly what i was about to ask


Also am I might be missing something but

I have set up a cronjob to automatically create the sitemaps every week and i have set the ping=yes, however from looking at the code it only appears to ping google and not yahoo, would it be possible to add Yahoo and Ask to this so they are automatically pinged as well?

[Woodymon]

When I create the sitemap I get messages telling me that four pages have been successfully created. However, when I try to view the sitemapezpages.xml, I get the following error:

Note the xml files really are not intended to be "viewed" by your or the public. They are only created for Google to parse.

At any rate, which program are you attempting to open/view the XML file with?

You should be able to open the file in a text editor just fine (e.g. NotePad ++).

One note: I just discovered the module is adding zen_id's to the entries in sitemapezpages.xml

This is NOT good. Best for you to remove them.

So for:

<loc>http://www.your_domain.com/your_shop/index.php?main_page=page&amp;id=12&amp;chapter=2&amp;zenid=blahblahblah</loc>

Change to:

<loc>http://www.your_domain.com/your_shop/index.php?main_page=page&amp;id=12&amp;chapter=2</loc>

Woody

[Woodymon]

One note: I just discovered the module is adding zen_id's to the entries in sitemapezpages.xml

Strange. The GSM output I generated late last month contained zen_id's in sitemapezpages.xml. However I just generated updated XML output, and I do not observe zen_id's. So I guess problem solved. But just in case you should check your output BEFORE pinging Google to come parse your GSM xml.

Woody

[Woodymon]

Can these submissions be included in the sitemap admin?:
Ask.com:
LiveSearch

The latest version of GSM mod supports Sitemaps 0.9 protocol. So if you have your sitemap listed in robots.txt any service you subscribe to supporting the standard should be able to use the XML feed generated by the GSM mod.

(e.g. Google Sitemaps, Yahoo Site Explorer, etc)

See:

1. http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22

2. http://livesearch.spaces.live.com/bl...138!1342.entry

Note MS Live Search sitemap product is now in beta (e.g. sitemap tools, live search portal, etc). You can sign up for beta account. Instructions at above URL.

Note these "sitemap feeds" are independent from "product search feeds". So it is recommended you also sign up and generate feeds for GoogleBase Product Search and MS Live Product Search. (Unlike these services which are free, "Yahoo Product Submit" is a paid CPC service which feeds "Yahoo Shopping"). And there are many other free "shopping search services" you can create custom feeds for.

Woody