Google - site indexing

[RuralWeb]

Sorry I missed that bit out! We moved to Actinic and had to change hosting company too.

It makes a BIG difference if you tell a full story - Google sees all.

[ripegifts]

I would recommend submitting your sitemap to google. To do this, register for their webmaster tools. It allows you to upload an xml sitemap with all your pages, tells you when the last crawl was, how any pages were crawled, which search terms your site is coming up under and at what rank. It's pretty nifty. Not sure how to create an xml sitemap? This site will generate one for you for free.

I would also strongly recommend registering for Google Analytics . You just paste the code in your templates before the end of the body tag and you'll get highly detailed stats or your site, including an overlay of each page of your site showing where on the page visitors clicked and where they went to next. Very, very nice. And did I mention it's FREE? I actually paid money for a program that does only half of it. We live and learn...

[RuralWeb]

And did I mention it's FREE

Not quite - google harvest all the information about your site for thier own use. They know who visits your site, where they go, what they buy, how much they pay and how they pay.

Many people stear well clear of it for these reasons.

[ripegifts]

I didn't go as far as enabling the ecommerce tracking, so I'm not too worried. I'm still a fan.

[SSheldon]

I would recommend submitting your sitemap to google. To do this, register for their webmaster tools. It allows you to upload an xml sitemap with all your pages, tells you when the last crawl was, how any pages were crawled, which search terms your site is coming up under and at what rank. It's pretty nifty. Not sure how to create an xml sitemap? This site will generate one for you for free.

I would also strongly recommend registering for Google Analytics . You just paste the code in your templates before the end of the body tag and you'll get highly detailed stats or your site, including an overlay of each page of your site showing where on the page visitors clicked and where they went to next. Very, very nice. And did I mention it's FREE? I actually paid money for a program that does only half of it. We live and learn...

That sounds excellent thank you! Done the sitemap stuff already

Although I thought other posts had suggested that Google Analytics code had actually messed up their page rankings?

[RuralWeb]

Although I thought other posts had suggested that Google Analytics code had actually messed up their page rankings

True, although it is the google sitemap that is causing some sites more problems.

[SSheldon]

True, although it is the google sitemap that is causing some sites more problems.

Oh dear what problems are being experienced?
A quick search just revealed people having problems verifying their sites after they had used a custom 404 error page, which we too seem to get. The Google webmaster page suggests using a meta tag in the index page. Can we just add the meta tag into the template or will this cause problems? If we could do this without problems, into which template should the meta tag be added?
Many thanks

[RuralWeb]

Oh dear what problems are being experienced

Lots - it now looks like the cause of many sitmap problems is due to the software used to generate the sitesmaps which is why some sitemaps work ok and others trash the sites indexing.

[SSheldon]

any idea about the meta tag?

[RuralWeb]

I never use google sitemap so cannot help with your meta tag question.

[ripegifts]

I chose the option to create an html page with the code and upload it via ftp - didn't try the meta tags myself, so can't help there, sorry. We haven't experienced any rankings issues, but we'll probably have to wait until the next google dance to see for sure. Here's hoping.