Re: sitemaps in general

Hi ragrone,
Part of the problem could be the
www and not www issue discussed many times in this group.
Do not submit two sitemaps, one for www.domain.com
and the other for domain.com.
Chose the domain name most convenient to you
(with www or without www) and submit the sitemap
for URLs in this domain.
If you can, do a 301 permanent redirection from
the domain name you dropped to the one you want.

ragrone@hotmail.com wrote:
> Thank everyone for their feedback/input however,unless this "sitemap"
> thing becomes an "etched in stone" procedure for Google - I think I
> will drop out of this beta program.
>
> My results have disappeared from indexing and in fact I have lost all
> ranking for both my sites.
>
> The one site (by the way I switched to a free hosting service for this)
> http://pcnetworkctr.netfirms.com has tons of inbound links from just
> about everything you would be looking for. I think every page has been
> crawled by Yahoo and listed as well.
>
> My newer site http://www.network-support-solutions.com has done
> miserably and I have even linked it back to the above site for max
> exposure. This site I started just for some exposure as well as, (well
> I haven't quite gotten there yet) but to attract installation style
> business. So with the "lack-luster" of inbound links and what not I
> subscribed to I think cj.com and brought in some outsource advertising.
> Things that is someone stumbled across in a search (obviously not
> Google) and realized that this is to be a commercial site more then a
> site that provides commercial goods from others, they can click their
> way out. I also created a links page that I'm not quite finished with
> again more hopes. At this time that url doesn't jump out at you in any
> web site navigation but it is there.
>
> I guess all in all I'm throwing in the towel with this beta program. I
> have created 2 sitemaps for the second site
> network-support-solutions.com one .xml that includes the all so wanted
> www. preface to each url (as suggested by Google) and another plain old
> .txt file that does not include the www. prefix. Anyone want to guess
> which one is actually being indexed?
>
> Well all and all it was kind of a pain in the butt and I suppose the
> bottom line is if you want decent exposure from Google plan on paying
> for it (which is what I will be doing once I have finished my marketing
> analysis......