Coding Horror: The Importance of Sitemaps
I'm constantly looking up my own stuff via Google searches, and I guess I've gotten spoiled. I expect to type in a few relatively unique words from the title and have whatever web page I know is there appear instantly in front of me. For the first two weeks, this was definitely not happening reliably for Stack Overflow questions. I'd type in the exact title of a question and get nothing. Sometimes I'd even get copies of our content from evil RSS scraper sites that plug in their own ads of questionable provenance, which was downright depressing. Other times, I'd enter a question title and get a perfectmatch. Why was old reliable Google letting me down? Our site is simple, designed from the outset to be easy for search engines to crawl. What gives?
What I didn't understand was the importance of a little file called sitemap.xml.
No comments:
Post a Comment