Sitemap Generator Forum

First of all, I would congratulate these people for this excellent script they have.

I have set it successfully and is working fine.

I have certain important queries which will be usefull to everybody.

1) What is the difference between Pinging Google through Your Script    &    Re-Submitting the sitemap to google using the Google webmasters area.

- After using your script with the ping option , I thought the re-submitted date on google sitemap's members area will change, but it did not happen.

It shows two dates - Submitted & Downloaded , an explanation would be greatly appreciated.

2) I have set a cron job to create & ping google daily.

- Is it OK to ping google any number of times?

3) What is the best time duration to set for a cron job to create sitemap & ping google using xml-sitemaps?

4) Is it neccessary to re-submit the sitemap often through the google webmaster's area after setting the cron jobs as mentioned above?

Thanks,
Abhilash
Abhilash.Net

Hi,

thanks!

1. The difference is that script can ping google automatically, so you don't need to do this every time after sitemap generation. You don't see it in the list because only manually submitted sitemaps are included in the Google webmasters area. It is even possible to have the same sitemap submitted in different webmasters accounts and you will see only the entries submitted by this specific webmaster account.
2. Yes, there is no mentioned penalty for that.
3. That depends on how often your website changes - if it is modified every day, it's fine to set a daily cron job.
4. No, it's not necessary. Webmasters are just allows you to check if there is no errors in your sitemap/ensure google reads it correctly.

So, in the end i'm a bit confused about the real meaning of Frequency parameter in the elements of sitemap.xml... i believed setting it to daily was meaning that the spider itself would have visited that page once a day, setting it weekly was meaning that the spider itself would have visited that page once a week, ...

Is it right ?

If yes, then the real power of pinging a sitemap frequently is regarding only the need of alerting the search engine about the presence of eventual new content pages... (because for the old pages the search engine already knows that it has to check them again every FREQ time)... is this interpretation correct ?

tnx a lot for a brief reply

deepz

Hello,

that is just a "hint" for search engines, not a directive, so they might re-visit it at different time intervals.
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