sitemaps pretty much rock – and if your public area has under 500 pages, you can use this free tool to create the sitemaps.

xml-sitemaps.com/index.php

then you download the uncompressed xml version and download it to your adult site’s main domain folder – yoursite.com

then create your google account if you don’t have it, log into my account, go to webmaster tools and then to sitemaps and submit your sitemap. you may need to verify your site, but that’s very easy to do.

and the results rock!

I’ve read a lot of horror stories with sitemaps, but all of them happened to people who used generic software to generate their sitemaps. In a few cases I’ve written my own sitemaps (writing my own code to build them) and have never had any problems. I’d NEVER use off-the-shelf software to generate a sitemap – it will never understand my site as well as I do.

However, if I have an RSS feed I submit that as the sitemap. It’s better in many ways because my RSS feed contains the entire post (which is generally a good idea) and I get into Google Blog Search instantly – you don’t have to wait to be crawled like you do with a sitemap that only has URLs, and you don’t have any of the potential negative side effects of poorly built sitemaps. Once the search engines know of a URL I don’t find that it helps to keep reminding them it exists – so an RSS feed with the latest pages is more than sufficient.

I use Google sitemaps for all my porn sites, and its clearly helped in getting more pages indexed properly. That it affects your site badly is from what I know a myth, its more likly to be due to something else. There are so many other things that can make google drop your score.

The only difference I can see here is that I use and do exactly what Google recommends here:

google.com/webmasters/to…generator.html

Its a small script you install on your server and can setup a cron job to run every so often. In my case on my site I run it every day due to so many new pages being added daily. It then notifies google about the updates and it gets indexed soon after.

It is a bit complicated to setup the config file, (installing it is easy, you just upload the files) but once you got it going its far better than any other sitemap script.

I think the horror stories with sitemaps are due to duplicate content issues and not properly assigning the priority of each page.

Priority is one of the most valuable parts of the sitemap protocol. It lets you tell the search engine how important you think each page is relative to other pages on your site. A good example is terms of service and privacy policy pages. Just about every page links to the, but they’re not important. But it gets into other aspects of your site as well – if you run a blog the post pages may (or may not) be more important to you than the category/tag pages…

The problem with scripts that build sitemap files is that they’re indiscriminate. They don’t know the importance of each page. They don’t know the canonical URL for each page. They don’t know you’ve set up a redirect or tagged a link as ‘nofollow’. As a result, they could very well essentially throw shit at the search engines and cause the search engines to be wary of your site.

That’s why I say you probably don’t want to use a sitemap unless you built it yourself and know exactly what’s in it. You may be telling Google things you didn’t intend (like the priority of each page). Or you may be giving them non-canonical URLs which will create duplicate content problems.

In general, if your site has a good internal link structure and you submit your RSS feeds as sitemaps so new pages get picked up quickly, there’s really no need for a sitemap built with a generic tool. On the other hand, if you build one yourself that properly assigns priority, then sitemaps are worthwhile…