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Google Mojo / sitemap.xml
One thing we’ve noticed about Get Satisfaction is that our threads don’t seem to have as much Google mojo as our old support forum used to. That is, when we Google for words and phrases that occur for our product on Get Satisfaction, the relevant threads don’t seem to bubble up near the top of the Google results as much as we’re used to.
I did a little poking around, and I wasn’t able to find a sitemap.xml file for Get Satisfaction. Maybe it’s there and I didn’t find it, but if GS isn’t keeping a sitemap.xml file up to date, then that could be related to the lose of mojo we think we’ve seen. (Highly dynamic sites, like Get Satisfaction, are practically impossible for a search engine to crawl completely. To help search engines find all the pages, a site can keep a static list of them in a sitemap.xml file.)
I did a little poking around, and I wasn’t able to find a sitemap.xml file for Get Satisfaction. Maybe it’s there and I didn’t find it, but if GS isn’t keeping a sitemap.xml file up to date, then that could be related to the lose of mojo we think we’ve seen. (Highly dynamic sites, like Get Satisfaction, are practically impossible for a search engine to crawl completely. To help search engines find all the pages, a site can keep a static list of them in a sitemap.xml file.)
I’m hopeful
4
people like this idea
I like this idea!
Tell me when this idea gets some attention.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who like this idea, the more it gets noticed.
The company has this under consideration.
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Inappropriate?Thanks! This is something we want to do. We'll update as we have more information.
I’m thankful
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Inappropriate?Let me reiterate how important I think this issue is. I did some testing yesterday, and it seems to me that Google is doing a very poor job indexing our our older pages on GS. It will pick up the title and sometimes synopsis from the archive pages, but it really doesn’t seem to get
Support pages are an important form of advertising for our company. They are rich with words that we want to be associated with (sftp, ftp, awesome). And they showcase our commitment to providing an excellent user experience. If Google can’t find our support pages, then we’re losing a form of public profile that we consider very valuable.
Also, though we aggressively promote Get Satisfaction is our official support venue, many users (myself included) will search google for answer before they think to look to the official venues. When this happens either the user might give up, or we might end up answering by hand a question that the user should have found here.
Finally, the more pages that GS gets index in Google, the more people that will be exposed to GS. Companies pay money to show up in Google searches. GS is thick with pages that people will be searching for, and which will show up for free... if Google knows about them. It seems to me that GS itself would be the biggest beneficiary from making sure every page gets listed in a sitemap.xml file.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?You're right, this is important. While I can't add anything into the short term dev schedule, I might be able to hack something together that generates the sitemap files. I will update when I have more info.
I’m a one-man skunkworks
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Inappropriate?That would be awesome. Thanks, Thor. I didn’t mean to sound overly dramatic, the world isn’t going to end if GS doesn’t isn’t perfectly indexed by Google. But I do think it’s a feature that deserves serious consideration because I think it could be a big win for everyone.
I’m happy
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Inappropriate?Do you have a sitemap feature now? -
Inappropriate?No, we have not added that.
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