Sitemaps can help save the Planet but only if you use lastmod Tags

Writing about web page http://www.bendigomitchell.com/hire.htm

I have been working with Bendigo Mitchell of Kenilworth to re-focus their website onto their casual forklift hire and longer term leasing and contract hire services. Working with their web-developers, eStirling, the changes were delivered to a trial area for review and approval.

Here I checked their XML sitemap to find that whilst ot did include the lastmod field these were all set to 2006, when the site was first published. One quick call and they updated it using an excellent tool with a good stylesheet making it very easy to verify.

The lastmod tag is important as it is this that saves the processor cycles at Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask’s data centres. If you just re-submit the sitemap you force the spiders to check every page not just the changed content. Use wisely and the search engines return more often.

Sometimes the built-in tool sets all the dates to the run time. There are two solutions to this. Run an external generator if your web-server accurately provides the changed dated. If all else fails you can just change the date manually. I can generate sitemaps easily for the www.james-hutton-pressings.com group of sites but when a couple of page changes inc. their James Hutton Mouldings about page, EPS Mouldings , it was quicker to do it by hand.

Robert McGonigle : 19 Nov 2009 16:00 |  Tags: Eps Mouldings Forklift Hire Google Sitemaps Lastmod XML Sitemaps |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem