Google Sitemaps

Trying out Google Sitemaps. Vaguely, looks like the service is supposed to make Google some sort of website subscriber.

Following Google’s instructions:

  1. Downloaded python script from sourceforge (along with example config,urllist files).
  2. Created the urllist.txt including most of my urls with their parameter values based on their database values.
  3. Created config.xml (following example_config.xml) – pointing to the newly created urllist.txt.
  4. Uploaded the files to the webserver.
  5. Ran the script that generated the sitemap.xml.gz file.
  6. Used my google account to notify google with the newly created file.

Previously, Google didn’t enlist many of the dynamically generated pages, it seems partly because some used query (url) parameters didn’t appeal to Google algorithms (using parameter names with ID like productID, categoryID). [here] and [here]

I’ll keep monitoing the website’s enlisted urls for any changes.