Where did my Data folder go?

I installed vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap last night. I had a look this morning after my first report was emailed to me and my ./vbseo_sitemap/data folder is empty. Is this supposed to be the case, or has something strange happened?

Also I am struggling with two other questions:
1) Where is the txt based Yahoo sitemap that I need to submit to Yahoo located?

2) Is there any evidence that using the sitemap is actually beneficial to search engine rankings?

Thanks,

John

Hello John,

please make sure that you have set permissions for vbseo_sitemap/data/ folder to 0777.
Yahoo sitemap is accessed at:

Code:

http://yourforumsroot/sitemap.txt.gz

(it will be urllist.txt.gz for sitemap generator v1.7+)

I thought I had, but aparently not.

Thanks, all sorted now.

Forgot to add, still waiting to see if anyone has any evidence of vBSEO Sitemap improving their rankings?

Thanks,

Submitting your sitemap to Google is already known to improve your Google SE indexing, since Google offers the service. This tool just builds the sitemap for you so you don't have to do it manually.

Then what is the explanation for the examples of people who have lost pagerank and indexed pages while using the mod?

Are you talking about the vBSEO Sitemap Generator, or vBSEO? I have seen no cases of anything lost due to the Sitemap Generator. It can only help...

With vBSEO, it's been known that your indexing will drop initially until your site is reindexed, since all your URLs are changed.

Just to add: If you have paitience, it's well worth it.

Pages indexed on my site: site:fireblades.org - Google Search (225k)

vBSEO pages indexed on my site: site:fireblades.org vbseo - Google Search (216k)

Keith, how often do you generate and update the sitemap? I read that doing it too often may result in google penalising you.

Mine generates and submits nightly at 3am. Never had any issues...

Thanks Keith