Google Sitemaps Experiment
I’ve been doing some experiments with the Google Sitemaps program over the last 5 days. I thought I might report my findings so far.
We have created 6 new directories. They launched between Wednesday and Friday of last week - August 10-12. We have created and submitted sitemap.xml files with four of the directories. The other two have no sitemap.xml files. 2 of the six directories currently have 2 pages indexed. The rest have 1 page indexed.
I am slowly linking them from other sites. I have blogged about all of the directories except for one as single blog post. I have put a site wide link to one directory on my personal blog.
I am finding that Google continually spiders the sitemap.xml files. But rarely looks at the actual pages. It will look at the home pages but that’s about it right now. Yahoo and MSN are spidering much more vigorously. MSN, actually, is starting to move quite deeply through the sites.
These are the stats of how many pages have been indexed for each directory:
Date Engine Pages Indexed Site Code
8/15/2005 Google 1 Be
8/15/2005 Google 1 Ba
8/15/2005 Google 1 Ce
8/15/2005 Google 2 C
8/15/2005 Google 2 D
8/15/2005 Google 1 Ca
8/15/2005 MSN 8 Be
8/15/2005 MSN 0 Ba
8/15/2005 MSN 2 Ce
8/15/2005 MSN 7 C
8/15/2005 MSN 0 D
8/15/2005 MSN 4 Ca
8/15/2005 Yahoo 3 Be
8/15/2005 Yahoo 0 Ba
8/15/2005 Yahoo 0 Ce
8/15/2005 Yahoo 0 C
8/15/2005 Yahoo 3 D
8/15/2005 Yahoo 2 Ca
I am intentionally linking these sites pretty slowly. I will say, however, that site “Be” with 8 pages indexed in MSN is the site I created a site wide link to in a blog of mine.
I’m sorry I’m not giving out the directories here yet. I just want to keep this experiment fairly controlled. I don’t want these sites to be given links from overly high PageRanked sites yet.
I’ll review this weekly to see how things progress.
As an aside, all of these directories have Google AdSense listings on them. When I turned on these directories, the click through rate of all our AdSense sites immediately went to zero. We were still getting the same traffic. But for some reason we suddenly stopped getting clicks. Then Sunday August 14, the clicks started happening again. I don’t know if that was a coincidence or if there was some connection. I’ve found some vague similar situations on some of the discussion boards. I’m not sure we’ll ever find out for sure. But I thought it was interesting.