I'm a bit puzzled as to why my sitemap isn't updating, as when I created it, I asked for it to be updated weekly.

 

I post blog posts regularly and not one of them has been recognized in the sitemap yet.

 

What's the best course of action?

A Google sitemap does not force Google to update or reindex each week, it's simply to notify it has been updated. The theory goes that crawlers will eventually learn and come back more frequently. I would suggest;

 

1. Check your site: Do you have a no index or no follow on the page. Yes it might seem obvious but it's like wondering if you left the gas on at home.
2. Check for Crawl Errors in Webmaster Tools / Messages and html improvements (duplicate information)
3. Check Google: Use site:www.yoursite.com/yourpage.html and see if the page is in the index. Then test an older post, is that in the index? There will always be a time delay between found, indexed and ranked ... the authority of your site will close this gap (but anyone else correct me here).

There are probably more ideas than this but without a link or access to your sitemap it's guess work from me

Unless, of course, you're suggesting that you've created a sitemap but that actual sitemap isn't listing your blog posts.

 

How did you generate the sitemap? Was it through wordpress or do you have a static website and you used a generator for the sitemap?

NoClass is right

Edited March 6, 201313 yr by EthanWard

Unless, of course, you're suggesting that you've created a sitemap but that actual sitemap isn't listing your blog posts.

 

How did you generate the sitemap? Was it through wordpress or do you have a static website and you used a generator for the sitemap?

 

That's the alternative can of worms

Hi guys,

 

This is a link to the sitemap: http://www.snapdesignstudio.com/sitemap.xml

 

As you can see there are links for '_projects/projectname.php'

 

But there should also be ones like '_blog-posts/blogpostname.php'

 

I've done as NoClass suggested and searched Google for the actual pages and they are indexed.

 

Jason - it was created with the Free Online Sitemap Generator (xml-sitemaps.com). Is this a bit of crap place to generate one?

I see whats happened. When you said to update weekly, that is suggesting to Google to come back on a weekly basis. Not to update the actual sitemap. There are scripts out there that will create a sitemap that updates whenever you post. But right now, it will only show the pages that were live when you created the sitemap

As Jason says there are tools out there and since the site is db driven a little php generator output as xml will do the trick. The xml-sitemaps.com generator is ideally for static sites or you will need to recreate each time the site is changed, they do a server version (I think it's a 'cron' job - whatever that is lol).

Thanks for you help.

 

NoClass - is this the one you mean? http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html

Nice thread,helps me to finding some points about Google sitemap.

One option is you can update manually.