Sitemaps Hmmm
- 21st Jul 2006
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Ok I have put my neck on the line by telling people to use sitemaps, and in private IM’s etc etc .. people have been pointing out a few things they don’t like .. so I will start with Pagerank…
Ok on the “Crawl stats” page if you are lucky!, you will see at the base of that page a section called “Your page with the highest PageRank”
here is mine :
Your page with the highest PageRank
Jul - http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2006/06/06/google-bans-diggcom/
Jun - http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2006/06/06/google-bans-diggcom/
May - http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2005/04/21/things-you-dont-want-to-see/
but 2 things :
First
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2006/06/06/google-bans-diggcom/ has a page rank of 5
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/archives/2005/04/21/things-you-dont-want-to-see/ has a page rank of 6
Second .. Why does my other site in Sitemaps not show the “Your page with the highest PageRank“ to me thats a real bad bug !!
DaveN
10 Comments | Leave a comment »
David, Sitemaps is in the Beta stage. Bugs are supposed to happen right ?
I found 4 others, amongst which is :
http://www.xperts.ro/temp/google-sitemaps-error.gif
Yeah i am having the same issue. I have some higher PR inner pages but still sitemaps shows my homepage as the highest PR.
Still in beta though???
Site maps isn’t perfect by any means, there are some things that need to be worked out obviously.
I do think that is a pretty progressive idea and am happy Google has stepped up and offered it to webmasters for free. The crawl reports are nice and helped us diagnose an issue already. Work in progress I am sure.
I have the same issue. In my case, the home page of my site has PR, while the page listed as highest has PR0. Go figure.
Dave,
will you be submitting every site you have to sitemaps :)
One thing that curious is stiemaps retroactively changes “your page with the highest pagerank.” This has happened to me several times. Recently, in July, it went back and changed the top pages for May and June.
I suppose it can be working behind a few months to figure out a historical PR, but it still seems odd.
Maybe Sitemaps is working from the ‘real’ pagerank values rather than the representation that we see on our toolbar.
Or perhaps it is just broken like everything else at Google seems to be.
Just spotted another Sitemaps error.
It says that ‘Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jul 21, 2006.’ but the cached version of the page is showing a date of 23rd July.
Is any of the information in Sitemaps reliable?
Yeah, same problem.
And it takes google sometimes about 2-3 days to visit.
I think the date discrepancies can be explained — likely the server set that Sitemaps hits to deliver up reports on when the homepage was last spidered are different servers than you hit when viewing the cached version of the page.
It would be helpful, though if the Sitemaps team would clearly explain or label the timeperiods on which the reports are based upon. For instance, the top keyword searches and associated ranking values — over what timeperiod are those metrics based upon?
I blogged about some of their recent feature upgrades, along with comments on other aspects I wish they’d improve at:
http://www.naturalsearchblog.com/archives/2006/06/26/google-sitemaps-upgrades-help-webmasters/