An Experiment of a Webmaster

So far Google Sitemaps is really interesting me. For those who don’t know, Google Sitemaps is googles attempt to let a webmaster describe the characteristics of their site, how often the pages change, and most importantly what pages exist at all. Googles crawler is extremely effective at browsing your whole site and indexing it, but like any automated system it has some issues. It has to recognise and avoid loops so it doesn’t keep requesting the file with just different things on the end like ?sid=. phpBB, the forum software, adds the ?sid= to your address if the user doesn’t have cookies enabled so they can track this person login. Google doesn’t use cookies so they’ll be given session IDs in their url unless you fix it. When this happens google thinks they are all different pages and has to sort it out, which is hazardous to your site since it may just give up and leave.

My forums have had many google crawler issues that I’ve had to resolve lately and it probably going to have many more. Luckily google sitemaps gives me chance to tell google what pages I have without it having to crawl my forums and find all the posts themselves. This greatly increases the chances that all the nice juicy content in there will be picked up. Being years old now and fairly active I have around 60k posts.

I’m also going to be coding up some plugins on my other sites to do google sitemaps. First, for my online roleplaying game, I’m going to code a map for all of the players. This way their descriptions are found. Right now only a few select players make the top 10 lists that include them right off the home page, the rest may not be noticed even if their descriptions are content rich. Hopefully google sitemaps will bring them to the light of day Also in game items and spells are only linked to from the players. Spells being the worst. If a spell is not on a player when google runs over them, it wont pick it up. The items are going to take some real work to get up sucessfully, but I’ll get into that another time maybe.

The bottom like is, more ways to describe your content sucessfully can only be a good thing. If you do it and it doesn’t matter, well it doesn’t matter. If you do it and a search engine finds a new gem, then you’re in luck. I can’t wait to see the effects on the forums.