It looks as if the Google Site Map approach does have some effeect but quite what and when is not too clear.
We have used one of the free sitemap generation tools from www.freesitemapgenerator.com
which is extreemly slow but does the job eventualy. It also picks up some broken links and gives us the opportunity to fix them.
Speed is not exactly of the essence in this part of Google because several weeks after we put up our first site map XML file we have started to see changes in the number of pages indexed at some data centers. This was then joined by a third higher version and today the middle one has reduced in value somewhat at its data centers. So we still have three: 460, 1000 and 1530 spread across different centers in roughly equal proportions.
The current cache is still over a week old here in the UK so Google is not always picking up all of the weekly changes we make associated with Composer of the week.
The other odd thing that has occured in the last few weeks is that our sitemap page on the site has suddenly bobbed up as a popular page on the site. We have augmented it with links to all the sample pages and it appreas to be an effective entry page for some visitors. My guess would be that they are mainly returning visitorsbut that is not an analyis we have found/checked out as yet.
The less said about Broadband performance this morning the better!*!*!*!
We have used one of the free sitemap generation tools from www.freesitemapgenerator.com
which is extreemly slow but does the job eventualy. It also picks up some broken links and gives us the opportunity to fix them.
Speed is not exactly of the essence in this part of Google because several weeks after we put up our first site map XML file we have started to see changes in the number of pages indexed at some data centers. This was then joined by a third higher version and today the middle one has reduced in value somewhat at its data centers. So we still have three: 460, 1000 and 1530 spread across different centers in roughly equal proportions.
The current cache is still over a week old here in the UK so Google is not always picking up all of the weekly changes we make associated with Composer of the week.
The other odd thing that has occured in the last few weeks is that our sitemap page on the site has suddenly bobbed up as a popular page on the site. We have augmented it with links to all the sample pages and it appreas to be an effective entry page for some visitors. My guess would be that they are mainly returning visitorsbut that is not an analyis we have found/checked out as yet.
The less said about Broadband performance this morning the better!*!*!*!