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i-sounds
05-Jun-2007, 11:01 AM
Hello,

:confused: I have noticed that Google seems to have started indexing our Actinic sitemap as a page for visitors, however, our Actinic sitemap does not look visually friendly to customers:

http://www.inspirationsounds.co.uk/acatalog/sitemap.html

Therefore, we have used a free sitemap generator called "softplus gsite crawler" to create an XML and Yahoo sitemap for our site, the google sitemap is here:

http://www.inspirationsounds.co.uk/sitemap.xml

The other thing is that I have used our robots.txt to disallow the Actinic sitemap with the following line:

Disallow: /acatalog/sitemap.html

I guess my question is this.... Does this make any sense whatsoever? It seems logical to me, but this doesn't necessarily mean anything as the truth is I am a novice! :o

I am concerned that by disallowing a directory which starts with /acatalog that I could be disallowing our entire product range (brochure) from being indexed, I would be very grateful for any advice on this..

Best wishes,

Jan (i-Sounds)

RuralWeb
05-Jun-2007, 11:03 AM
Does this make any sense whatsoeverNo I would say you are barking MAD doing this as one of the main reasons in having a site map is to allow the spiders in NOT to block them.

i-sounds
05-Jun-2007, 11:06 AM
So you think it is better to have two sitemaps? Rather than just 1?

RuralWeb
05-Jun-2007, 11:15 AM
So you think it is better to have two sitemaps? Rather than just 1I would take a step back and have a hard think about what you are doing here as you could really mess up your site doing all this

Duncan Rounding
05-Jun-2007, 11:15 AM
On my sites I have two - an xml file registered with G and an Actinic one as an html page.

i-sounds
05-Jun-2007, 11:43 AM
Ok, I only changed the robots yesteday, I will change it back now. Incidentally, on your homepage, do you link to the Actinic sitemap, or to the Google sitemap? Thanks for both of your help with this. I appreciate it! ;)

RuralWeb
05-Jun-2007, 11:44 AM
nk to the Actinic sitemapActinic only

Duncan Rounding
05-Jun-2007, 11:46 AM
You don't need a link to your xml sitemap - see Google sitemaps for information on how to use etc.

I have a link to the Actinic site map on all site pages.

i-sounds
05-Jun-2007, 11:58 AM
Thanks Duncan, I really appreciate your assistance. I have just changed the robots.txt back to what it was, and I will leave the actinic sitemap link on every page as recommended. Thank you so much! :)