Trouble Registering my .xml sitemap with Google

So Old Toad gave me the link to iWeb FAQ and I'm learning a lot... and now I seem to know just enough to be dangerous. So I've got some in depth questions about my site and getting google to recognize my sitemap.

I suppose my first question is this...

My iWeb sites are all hosted by Apple on me.com. The domains are all registered with godaddy and I use domain masking so that people can't tell that all of my businesses are running off of my personal .me account. I suppose this is where my confusion starts. Obviously I want google to find my sites by the urls I'm using to mask the .me addresses. Does this set-up interfere with 1. how I register with google or 2. how I tag my sitemap.xml files with google?

Here's a breakdown of what I've done...

I have two sites on my .me account. One is www.parcohomes.com and the other is www.operationarchitecture.com.

I'm following iWeb FAQ instructions on all of this.

1. I went to google Add URL and typed in http://www.parcohomes.com and http://www.operationarchitecture.com and not http://web.me.com/username/sitename/ for each of the sites.

2. I then registered with google webmaster tools.

3. I created a mapable navigation bar for my Parco Homes site and put it on the welcome page only. I masked it with a white box so that it doesn't display on the site.

4. I went to www.xml-sitemaps.com and created a map for only the Parco Homes site using http://web.me.com/username/Parco_Homes/

5. I downloaded the xml sitemap file an opened it in Safari to check that it was showing all of my pages. Everything looked good.

6. I dropped the .xml file into iDisc/Web/Sites.

7. I went into Safari and typed in http://web.me.com/username/sitemap.xml and my sitemap file popped up. Looking good.

Now here's where I get a little fuzzy. The iWeb FAQ site says that if I have more than one site that I need to rename the sitemap files to sitename_sitemap.xml. (Notice that they show an underscore and not a slash between sitename and sitemap.)

Does this mean the file for my first site should be named Parco Homessitemap.xml or is it really Parco_Homes/sitemap.xml? Well, I tried the both and when I try and navigate to these files through Safari I get an error. And if I really am supposed to rename each of my two .xml files then do they both go into the same folder on my iDisc or do they go one level deeper, into the individual site folders?

Incidentally, when I went to register my sitemap with google for the Parco Homes site I registered the site as www.parcohomes.com and not web.me.com/username/Parco_Homes.com. Now that it's been up there for a little while the google webmaster dashboard is showing an error for the Parco Homes sitemap. I guess I did that wrong, which has me think I'm supposed to be using the .me addresses here.

Somewhat related is that I also registered one of my sites with google as web.me.com/username/Parco_Homes but when I try and point google to the sitemap on my iDisc I get an error there too.

That's as far as I've gotten. I'v got a good sitemap file but only for one of the sites so far. I don't know what I'm supposed to rename that file if I'm going to throw two sitemaps into my iDisc and I don't know if they're both supposed to go in the same spot. I also don't get what I'm supposed to register these sites with google as. Do I use the url I've purchased from godaddy? Do I use the .me address instead?

Sorry this is so lengthy and detailed but I really have no idea what I'm doing. I feel as if I'm close but that the iWeb FAQ instructions get a little fuzzy at the end. Can anyone help?

Thanks!

iMac Intel Core Duo | Macbook Air | iPhone | Time Capsule, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Jan 24, 2009 1:47 PM

Reply
3 replies

Jan 24, 2009 5:32 PM in response to Benjamin Parco

You can only have one file called sitemap.xml in the folder Finder/Go/iDisk/My iDisk/Web/Sites.
Any other sitemap has to go in the website folder of the site it belongs to.

The sitemap in the "Sites" folder will stay there but the one in the website folder will get overwritten each time you publish so you have to refresh it each time.

You have to give google the MobileMe URL and not the one with your domain name as this only a redirect.

For the site with the map in the Sites folder, the URL for Google is...

http://web.me.com/username/

For the site with the map in its own folder the URL is ....

http://web.me.com/username/websitename/

When you go to ....

http://www.google.com/addurl/

... you can use your http://www.parcohomes.com URL

For proper indexing of your site you should hide the standard iWeb navigation and build your own. The iWeb FAQ site will tell you how and why here...

http://iwebfaq.org/site/iWebNavigationmenu.html

MobileMe is not intended for business websites and causes a lot of problems as you have found out.

I use Host Excellence for serious publishing, optimize and upload with Web Site Maestro and create upload and enter my sitemaps with Rage Sitemap Automator. Links below.

http://www.hostexcellence.com/index.php/v2/pages.dspmain?sc_cid=aff-he-cheekypup

http://www.tonbrand.nl/

http://www.ragesw.com/products/googlesitemap.html

Jan 24, 2009 10:43 PM in response to Benjamin Parco

The iWeb blog is not the best way to blog. You'd be better to use something like Google's Blogger and link it to your website.
Create your own navigation in iWeb and add the blog page as an external link so that it appears to be part of your website. You can also set this link to open in a new page so that your website is still loaded in the browser.

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Trouble Registering my .xml sitemap with Google

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