SEO

I've asked this question on 3 boards, including vbulletin.org where i downloaded the hack.....

It's the Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator.....

Got the following message when i clicked for 'your google sitemap url' in the webmaster tools on google:


This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

−
<sitemapindex xsi:schemaLocation=" Index of /schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/09/siteindex.xsd">
−
<sitemap>
−
<loc>
http://www.thesackshack.com/forums/sitemap_1.xml.gz
</loc>
<lastmod>2008-08-07T20:06:14+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>



Is this normal?

If not - would it be easier and more efficient and organized to just type a sitemap on notepad and do it myself, that way I can control the links/descriptions/etc.?

Yes this is what it should look like.

Thank you sooo much for the quick reply. Seems no one else out there knows :/

Am curious, would it be a good idea to robot.txt and block them from searching and scanning through pointless urls like member list, FAQ, register, etc.

Command them to just scan the main forum and all the sub-forums.....?

and ps: if this is how easy customer support easy, purchase day monday can't come quick enough

It is a good idea for SEO to block bots with the robot file. You can see here for an example of one that is good for SEO: Robot.txt file

"This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

is an IE7 display error/message/warning/whatever you want to call it.

The site map is RAW xml.
it is not meant to be viewed as a webpage, so when you pop it open in a browser and there's not a linked XSLT file (css for xml basically) to it, ie will display that 'error'.

Thanks a ton guys. Am curious though, the sitemap brought up 1016 URLS from my forum, and I KNOW a ton are pointless (register, FAQ, member profiles, etc.)

Would it be more beneficial for me to write a .txt file with JUST the URLS I want the bot to scan, nice and organized?

(PS: This would be used in conjunction with a robot command prohibiting it from searching links like the above mentioned).

With the generator you can disable all the pages that you do not want to be included.

the sitemap generator doesn't include a lot of the useless pages, and you can configure the members, tags, blogs, showpost, etc all from within the product

You guys rock Thanks so much.