Sitemap Protocol Forum

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Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:41:51 Z

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Program Manager, Server and Tools Online Operations Team

How to set up sitemap protocol xml for Bing?

Fri, 29 May 2009 16:31:54 Z

Where can I find instructions for setting up sitemap protocol xml which will be recognized by Bing?

And more generally, will this forum morph into Bing? Will Live Search still exist in parallel?

Thanks,
John

Are Google and MSN sitemaps the same?

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:43:53 Z

I have used the same sitemap I use for Google to submit to MSN. Goggle maps all of the pages from my site Dees Fancy Dress Costumes but Webmaster live only shows 8 pages.
Do I have to add any other fields to my sitemap or is it that the bot is having trouble crawling my site?

Multiple Sitemaps Submisions

Fri, 15 May 2009 17:04:26 Z

Hello,

i am very new with Live Webmastering Tool, recently i am using google tools and there have ability to submit multiple sitemaps with different names. like sitemap.xml and topics.xml . but i have not seen any multiple choice submision tools in LIVE Webmaster tool. then could it possible to add multiple sitemaps in MSNLIVE Webmastering Tool ?

thank you

Warning: 'sitemap' - tag isn't specified........what does this mean and how do I fix it?

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 12:06:49 Z

I am getting this message when I test my robot.txt file

Warning: 'sitemap' - tag isn't specified.

Can someone help me out? Thanks. http://www.universalfloor.net

Email universalflooring@juno.com

What's considered proper _ or - in URLs?

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 03:41:53 Z

Brett in playing around the last month it seems that these two aren't being treated equally by the engines and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the matter? When separating URL's should be be using the - , _ or another divider? The reason I ask is I am beginning to think the delay in indexing from your engine may be the divider. By mistake we switched when doing some new items and used the - ----> Norwood and all pages drilled under that using the divider - even those with plain text matching titles etc ---> custom koozies are still not showing even by searching with the site: ending.

All I could find when searching was url shortening services which really has no application. I've always assumed they were treated equally and I'm just wondering if that is true with Live? I've read and heard that using the + symbol can work as well. Just curious if they are all treated equally?

Also, do we have to use the sitemap pinging service when we do an update or can we use the submit feature within the live tools? That's a little unclear on which one to use/both, only the tool or only the ping.

Lastly, I've noticed some of the sitemap tools end up creating a lower and upper case version of a url even though we've specified upper case...in the examples above even though the pages are in caps the sitemap tool pulls both?

Tha

PromoManagers Promotional Items

using site map protocal

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:25:28 Z

Hello

I have generated xml site maps with http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and submitted them with msn webmaster tool.

I want to know if msn will index site maps which have been created in this program?

Correct Format for Live?

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:45:00 Z

Just making sure I'm using the right format as there seems to be serious lag in getting Live to pick up any changes in the sitemap. Using one of the available tools I have this for a new page:

<url>
    <loc>http://www.promomanagers.com/PolyPro-Big-Grocery-Tote.aspx</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-03-16T19:35:51+00:00</lastmod>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

The page is PolyPro Big Grocery Tote

The encoding is xml version 1.0 and utf-8.

Is it just a lag, it comes back as fine and there are zero errors. It only occurs with a couple of it

Also, is there a free program out there or reliable for pay program that someone can recommend?

PromoManagers Promotional Items

Brett** - Sitemaps - www or no www.com

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:28:40 Z

I know yahoo and google penalize a site that has uploaded a sitemap under www.lingerieoasis.com and lingerieoasis.com. I'm told they read this as duplicate content. Does MSN have a similiar penalty?

Thanks.

jgand

Newby...be gentle......

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 12:59:46 Z

Hi I was wondering..as I am very new to all this....would a subdomain have its own sitemap and get indexed seperately to the main domain, or do you do that through the main domain only. Sorry if this is a dumb question, many of you would of-course know the answer, but would appreciate any feedback.
Regards Jason

Jason

This forum has migrated successfully in January 2009

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:22:50 Z

As part of the migration, posting of new threads and messages is no longer allowed on the Forums 2.x platform.

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Thank you for your patience during the migration.

Alicia.

This forum is moving the week of 1/27/2009

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:39:15 Z

Microsoft has created a new forums platform (MSDN | TechNet | Expression | Microsoft) with increased performance, stability, and an improved user experience. During the week of 1/27/2009 this forum will move from the Forums 2.x Platform (http://forums.microsoft.com/) to the Forums 3.x Platform. To make sure this is a smooth transition, we want everyone using this forum to have a chance to try out the new forums in advance, and give feedback. We’ve created a Sandbox forum, where you can create threads and try out functionality, and a suggestions forum where you can give us your feedback. Please take some time to go to the new forums today and let us know what you think.

On the day the forum moves to the new platform, a post will be made letting you know the process has been started, and the forum will be locked to new posts. Once the process is complete, a final post to the forum will be made letting you know the forum has moved.

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3. Any bookmarks to this forum or threads within this forum will redirect to their new location

4. Your “My Threads” will be preserved on the new platform

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If you have feedback, let us know in the suggestions forum or contact the forum product planners directly at Andrew.Brenner at Microsoft.com or Jeremy.Kelley at Microsoft.com

Thanks,

Alicia

Multi-lingual Site

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:01:16 Z

I have a multi-lingual site, English and Spanish. Currently my sitemap has all of the pages on one sitemap: <Deleted URL> Would it be best to do a sitemap index to seperate out the two different languages? Also- can you specify language in a sitemap, e.g en-US or es-MX???

Sitemap index

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:27:41 Z

Hi,

I can use a sitemap index to list others compressed sitemaps?

thanks,

Carlos

About the Robots.txt

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 04:55:00 Z

Hi, I have creat my robots.txt file like this :

# Robots.txt file from http://www.dfdsolar.com
# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent: *
Disallow:

And i use the Live Robots.txt validation tool to evaluate my Robots.txt file, the result showed like this:

Warning: 'sitemap' - tag isn't specified.
**************************************************

What that mean?

And how can i correct my robots.txt

Sitemap url in robots.txt

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:55:08 Z

Hi,

i have read that its possible to put the sitemap url in robots.txt file. i have also found a post that mentioned to put the link and disallow bots. something like this:
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /

1. what is your opinion about this?
2. is this a good approach?
3. Does it mean that robots only crawl links inside sitemap.xml?

best regards,

LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:59:36 Z

I have successfully uploaded LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml but am unable to read it from a standard browser. I assume that if I am unable to read it then Live Search will be unable to read it either?

I have also tried to load it all in lower case without success. Is it case sensitive? I am happy that it is in the route directory as it is in the same place as the sitemap which can be read www.happierhounds.co.uk/sitemap.xml

I am using SiteMaker 4.0 hosted by moonfruit.com. Is this a common problem with site building applications/hosting services?

I don't seem able to use the meta tag option as I can only add keywords and a site description.

ROR.XML question

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:33:16 Z

One of my sites' contains a books catalog for online shoppers. I have not submitted this site to live search for inclusion via webmaster tools yet. I have a sitemap.xml file and I plan to add a ror.xml file that will detail books information. As I read on rorweb.com that crawlers from Google, Yahoo and Live look for this file in the root directory, my question is will the live crawler find my ror.xml file along with sitemap.xml to index my site pages

Thanks

Problem submitting sitemaps

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:54:02 Z

I have verified my sites and submitted the sitemaps with the webmaster tools.

The bot tries to get my sitemaps but the http status codes in log file are sc-status=200 and sc-win32-status=64.

One of the sitemap urls is : www.readyflowers.com.sg/sitemap.xml

I tried using gzip but I got the same error. I would prefer to use gzip because some of the sitemaps are large (>2MB) but I get the same error www.readyflowers.com.sg/sitemap.sg.xml.gz

Any ideas?

index site maps

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:43:18 Z

Hi,

1. How much time does it usually takes to msn to index site maps which were submitted properly via msn webmaster tool ?

2. will the authentication process should speed up the index time of site maps in msn ?

3. If I do not authenticate my site will it effect my site map submitting in msn webmaster tool in such way

so he will not index my site maps ?

Thanks Eddi

Added a sitemap made my domain and page score dropped!

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:40:10 Z

I added a sitemap to my top domain and within minutes, the domain score and page score dropped from 5 to 1. I hope it's just a bug!

Also, I have lots of subdomains and they seem to be included when I add the www domain. My sitemap for the www. subdomain only contains pages on that particular subdomain so I would need the possibility to add sitemaps for each subdomain. How can I do this without hurting the domain and page score even more?

UPDATE: After removing the sitemap and waiting 10 minutes, the score is back to 5. I still don't know if the score drop had anything to do with the sitemap or not.

Good sitemap generator

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:15:20 Z

Hi All

Does anyone know of a good sitemap generator?

The one I am currently using if free and will only generate a site map for a maximun of 500 pages.

Rod

www.books.leatherboundtreasure.com

gsite crawler

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:49:15 Z

is this sitemap created by gsite crawler acceptable to MSN?

http://www.silverstall.com/sitemap.xml

I think it fits the XML specs required by MSN however it has their rival search engine plastered all over it so i wondered if there were any issues in using it for MSN.

Wordpress Plug-in Sitemap Protocol

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 05:13:30 Z

I have this static page on http://www.srednarb-promotional.com/ and I created a wordpress blog in a folder. Then I installed a Sitemap Generator to the blog and included my static page on the sitemap which can be found at http://www.srednarb-promotional.com/items-corporategifts-srednarb/sitemap.xml. My question is that is this sitemap design allowed. Because sometime this week I've seen my site then on the next day it disappears again. Is this the cause of the changes I made on the sitemap.xml.

No sitemap on my site.

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:58:44 Z

What happens is I don't have a sitemap on my website. Is that the reason why MSN won't pick up my site?

www.bellababycakes.com.au

how to create site map for live search engine?

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:09:31 Z

After going depth on various search engine algorithm still i have some doubt on site map creation for live search engine. I have already create sitemap for yahoo and Google but not in Live search engine. I am giving more time for researching on live sitemap. Still I am not satisfy I want to help from live webmaster and others professional SEO Specialist and Online Marketing Specialist that how to create site map for live search engine as result Live boot will crawl easily.

Few question regard Live Search Engine and Sitemap_Index files.

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:52:26 Z

Hi,
I submitted sitemap_index.xml to Live, it have 7 sitemaps for now (each sitemap with 49.999 url's).

It does works fine with Yahoo! and almost 90% of pages indexed among Google even before I created the sitemaps.

I have around 400.000 pages, fully optimized and readable to both users & bots.
Yet, only 70 pages index on Live SE (Webmaster area mention 320 pages Indexed).
I did ping, added robots.txt (with sitemap: www.domain.com/sitemap_index.xml).

My question is if Live support sitemap_index and if not, should I submit each sitemap?

Thanks,
Rotem.

Videositemap

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 04:25:24 Z

Hi, sorry for my bad english
i would like to know is there any doc or guide to create videositemap for Live
Like Google videositemap
and Yahoo videositemap
Thanks
Best regard

I cannot verify my site even after loading LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:11:53 Z

I have successfully uploaded LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml but I still get a message that my site cannot be verified. I dont know what else to do.

Camfrog

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:43:53 Z

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still no pages being index

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:31:28 Z

Brett, Hi

Followed Andy's advice en re untagged script. But to no avail. Still struggling, spending hours, with checking links, checking structure, checking images, checking, checking and more checking and talking to experts, and writing. But all in vain.

You advised waiting to see what happened and to get back to you. Here it is for http://americanmadeyes.com/.

Only see one non existent page indexed. I therefore can understand why Live Search cannot index any pages. I just copied this from my account. The first entry, my home page, was last crawled in January.

The second one, the incorrect one seems to be the active one, having been crawled yesterday.

When I wrote about this non existent page, with an htmle extention, (never heard of one with an "e" on the end of it.) you said it would disappear when it was next crawled. Obviously, it hasn't happened.

Here it is, below, exactly as it appears.

AmericanMadeToys|Jewelry|ShoppingAmericanMadeFurniture|Cheese ...en us 1/30/2008 No

americanmadeyes.comzz us 6/4/2008 No

Am hoping the above info might help solve the problem.

Thank you, Brett

Ruth

1,000 link limit in Sitemapindex.xml

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:48:54 Z

We are about to go over the 1,000 sitemap file limit in the Sitemapindex.xml file. Is there a way to create another file?

How do we get around this issue?

How to "remove" old (unreachable) pages from MSN search results?

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:32:08 Z

What to do if the sitemap index contains more than 1000 entries?

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:28:24 Z

Is there a way to know whether the sitemap was indexed successfully?

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:35:49 Z

What are the essencial factors of sitemap?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:54:31 Z

Please review my site and suggest me to make sitemap. http://www.freeplant.net

Pinging webmaster.live.com from python script.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:19:58 Z

I'm sure you all know that you can ping live.com to notify a sitemap using either:

http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=sitemap_url
or
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=sitemap_url

They both work well in a browser. But.....

I use google's sitemap_gen.py. A fantastic piece of python script that generates your sitemaps and notifies search engines that they are available. I have it setup to run (using cron jobs) once a month on each of my sites. It really saves a lot of work.

I've modified the script to notify search engines other than google as follows:

NOTIFICATION_SITES = [
('http', 'webmaster.live.com', 'webmaster/ping.aspx', {}, '', 'siteMap'),
('http', 'www.google.com', 'webmasters/tools/ping', {}, '', 'sitemap'),
('http', 'search.yahooapis.com', 'SiteExplorerService/V1/ping', {}, '', 'sitemap'),
('http', 'submissions.ask.com', 'ping', {}, '', 'sitemap'),
('http', 'api.moreover.com', 'ping', {}, '', 'sitemap')
]

but the email that comes back says:

Notifying search engines.
Notifying: webmaster.live.com
Notification URL: http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz
HTTP error 404: Not Found
[WARNING] Cannot contact: webmaster.live.com
Notifying: www.google.com
Notification URL: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz
Notifying: search.yahooapis.com
Notification URL: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz
Notifying: submissions.ask.com
Notification URL: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz
Notifying: api.moreover.com
Notification URL: http://api.moreover.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz

Every time webmaster.live.com returns a 404 error. I've tried putting it in a different order..still returns 404 error.

But if I put the string:
http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.MySite.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz
in a browser it returns with a:

Thanks for submitting your sitemap.

message.

So the URL is correct but for some reason just doesn't work from the python script. Any ideas anybody? Trust Microsoft to be different and the only one that won't work.

Thanks for any help anybody can give.

My sitemap is not indexing and website status is empty - no data is available

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:44:42 Z

Hello,

My sitemap is not indexing and website status is empty - no data is available
I already put my sitemap http://www.netdownloads.com.br/sitemap.xml.gz
Live is not support gz format ?
I have too sitemap on format xml only on www.netdownloads.com.br/sitemap.xml but it is 4 MB.

Regards,
Edmilson
http://www.netdownloads.com.br

Why are only one of my pages being indexed on all these sites

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:47:52 Z

Why are only one of my pages in your index for the following sites? www.BudFirstRE.com, www.RichmondVAHomeInfo.com, www.BudFirst.com, www.BFirstRealEstate.com

For the record I used to spend a lot of money on PPC with Live Search. When you stopped indexing my pages and I tried on numerous occasions to resubmit inclusive of site maps. I just assumed you did not respect or appreciate my PPC business. Check all these site on Google or Yahoo.. They index all of my pages. If all my sites and pages started getting indexed again... I would consider a hefty budget on PPC. Either way it hardly seems fair... when I offer such rich content to the consumer and do my best to follow good practices to provide the best content possible under yours and all the other search engines guidelines. Can you point out where I have made mistakes? Could you help me get back indexed?

is it need update my sitemap every day?

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:15:52 Z

i renews my website: www.tideclothing.com every day,and update my sitemap every day.is it need update the sitemap every day? if no,How long is need to update?