Miva Site Map Builder

[2CDev]

I have a few questions starting with the admin Marketing Area >> Site Map

There are two check boxes you can check to have Miva notify Google and/or Bing when the sitemap is updated.

• In what manner does Miva tell Google and Bing that there are changes to the sitemap?
• How does Miva know which webmaster tools accounts these site maps are defined in, or does it notify the search engines some other way?
• How can we check to make sure that is actually happening?
• Could there be a hosting server connectivity issue, if you get a Network Error notice from Google and the bot doesn't spider the sitemap?

Back Story

Since April, my client has lost 60,000 URLs on Google. (We just figured this out.) He is falling off the Google Map. But is fine on Bing.

The site map feature in Miva has been turned on this whole time, and (we assume) correctly making weekly sitemap updates.

The bot has missed at least one month's spidering. During that time, there was an error concerning sitemap1, which has 50,000 URLs in it.

Steps We Have Taken

We have deleted all current sitemaps and rebuilt.
Checked and tested the Robots.txt for any problems. None.
We have fetched as Google. We continue to fetch critical pages this way, to get Google to reinstate those URLs.

[2CDev]

I should mention, also, that the Google Analytics data confirms that there is a degradation of server response times during this period.

[Brennan]

Here are some clarifications to your questions:

1. Both Google and Bing provide endpoints we can hit and pass in a sitemap file to let them know it has been updated.

https://support.google.com/webmaster...101333649&rd=1

You can also resubmit a sitemap by sending an HTTP GET request to the following URL, specifying your own sitemap URL:
http://google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/my_sitemap.xml

However I would recommend you also setup the sitemap in Google Webmaster tools. This is the primary way to tell Google about your sitemap.

If you are using a scheduled task to regenerate your sitemap at some interval and have these two options checked, Miva pings both bing and google. However this does not guarantee you that the search engines will then come re-index the site. It is up to them to actually come crawl the site.

I would look at Google Webmaster tools for any errors. It will tell you how often it is crawling the site and any errors with the sitemap.

[2CDev]

Thank you, Brennan. Appreciate it.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Something to look for: if you LOST 60K URLs, it may be that the site map is reaching its 'maximum' size limit of 50K urls--unless the Miva based google site map breaks down sitemaps files into smaller chunks--it just may give up reading any more if processing the file altogether. (I've personally never seen Miva's site map on a store over 50K urls, so this may be a red herring. Brennen?