[PLUG-TALK] Site map to be read by search engines

[Jason Martin]

On Nov 18, 2007 7:40 PM, Richard C. Steffens <rsteff at comcast.net> wrote:
> My wife read an article about folks making money by placing Google
> advertising on their web sites and decided I should try that. There's a
> ton of stuff describing how to go about it at:
>
> https://www.google.com/adsense
>
> I took a number of my old tour guide scripts, tweaked them a bit (they
> still need more work), added some images, and posted them to one of my
> Comcast sites.
>
> One of the recommendations for getting the search engines to find the
> site is to put up a site map. There are basic instructions for how to do
> one manually, plus an open source site map generating tool they have
> released, but as far as I can tell, it needs to be run on the web
> server. Since I'm doing this on a Comcast site, I don't have that option.
>
> They give instructions for the xml format they want used, so I started
> one for the modest site. When I submit it, they tell me it has errors,
> and tell me the line number. To me, it looks like their example,
> verbatim, at that point, since it only got as far as the first <url>
> description. Unfortunately, searching Google for more information
> becomes circular -- it sends me to a page that sends me to another page
> that sends me back to the one I started on.
>
> Is anyone else using Google Adsense? Any ideas for better examples of
> what sitemap.xml.gz should look like? Here's mine:
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
> xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
> xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
> http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
> <url>
>  <loc>http://home.comcast.net/~nwtours/</loc>
>  <lastmod>2007-11-10</lastmod>
>  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
> </ulr>
> <url>
>  <loc>http://home.comcast.net/~nwtours/MtStHelens/</loc>
>  <lastmod>2007-11-06</lastmod>
>  <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
> </ulr>
> <url>
>  <loc>http://home.comcast.net/~nwtours/gorge/</loc>
>  <lastmod>2007-11-06</lastmod>
>  <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
>  </ulr>
> </urlset>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> They tell me the problem is on line 6, but they don't tell me what the
> problem is.
>
> I realize that this sitemap is incomplete, since there are seven pages
> at each of the second levels. I thought I'd try getting the simple
> version working first, and then move on to a more complicated one.

I don't know anything about sitemaps, but it looks like you have
</ulr> instead of </url> closing your URL XML blocks.  Maybe that's
the only problem?

Jason