An Experiment of a Webmaster

My sitemaps admin screen has shown me the first helpful thing yeserday. The Dark Grimoire started using sitemaps on the forums as of the 2nd to try and get all of its posts indexed where they may have been more difficult to find before. I also modified the posting functions of phpBB2 to notify google of sitemap changes everytime someone posts a reply. I don’t utilize priorities yet mainly because the plug n play mod I started with doesn’t and I don’t want to have to figure out a way to quantify important of each thread yet.

Now, how has it helped me so far? Well first off I found that my robots.txt file was improperly listing old information to block. It also had previously been blocking many of my posts from being entered. I’ve modified my robots.txt to fit the new system and the posts are flowing freely again.

A second help has been the discovery of a character in urls that could prevent their proper viewing. I’ve modified the functions that urlencode post titles to remove this character, and now those posts are once again visible.

The posts have all been indexed at least once now also. They haven’t made it to the google index yet, but sitemaps says they’ve all been looked into. I’m watching almost daily to see what has been indexed and what hasn’t. At first I was freaked out because a lot of my stuff got deindexed by google after adding sitemaps and I thougth it was a bug. It just turns out that more unique content was indexed and the stuff that was removed was the robots.txt stuff taking effect.

I haven’t sitemapped moviereviews.organizedsite.com yet because I’ll have to do that custom, but its now all been pretty much indexed too. I’m going to start modifying and submitting the articles for syndication. This will hopefully increase the sites popularity quite a bit.