I have a how-to-do-it site for boat building, fly tying and lure
making.
I have about a thousand pages, mostly images but lots of text
here and there too ( all generated with a consistent GUI look-and-feel
by a hotrod CMS )

All of the top level category pages do well on relevant keyword
searches. Many of the interior pages, however, deeply nested in
a page structure that mirrors a file system hierarchy, don't even
get indexed.

Should I have a sitemap.xml with a thousand entries?
Or am I better off as I am, with a sitemap.xml that only lists
the the half dozen or so major category headings, like
"boat-blueprints", "Fly-Tying", "Boat-Builders-Forum", etc?

On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 22:12:43 -0000, Gene Yusnot
<EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

>I have a how-to-do-it site for boat building, fly tying and lure
>making.
>I have about a thousand pages, mostly images but lots of text
>here and there too ( all generated with a consistent GUI look-and-feel
>by a hotrod CMS )
>
>All of the top level category pages do well on relevant keyword
>searches. Many of the interior pages, however, deeply nested in
>a page structure that mirrors a file system hierarchy, don't even
>get indexed.

Do they have individual titles and meta descriptions? If not, supply
them.

BB
--

http://www.kruse.co.uk/internet-mark...l-business.htm
http://www.kruse.co.uk/internet-marketing-uk.htm
http://www.crystal-liaison.com/giving/

> Should I have a sitemap.xml with a thousand entries?

I think so, yes.


> Or am I better off as I am, with a sitemap.xml that only lists
> the the half dozen or so major category headings, like
> "boat-blueprints", "Fly-Tying", "Boat-Builders-Forum", etc?

Do that for HTML sitemaps (easier for humans)



--
best regards
Thomas Schulz / A1 Keyword Research:
http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/keyword-research/

dk_sz wrote:
>> Should I have a sitemap.xml with a thousand entries?
>
> I think so, yes.
>
>
>> Or am I better off as I am, with a sitemap.xml that only lists
>> the the half dozen or so major category headings, like
>> "boat-blueprints", "Fly-Tying", "Boat-Builders-Forum", etc?
>
> Do that for HTML sitemaps (easier for humans)
>
>
>

Thanks, I'll give it try--a 3-4 line perl script
should generate the comprehensive sitemap.xml just fine.

BBill FWIW: I said the wrong thing, my interior pages
do get indexed, and yes, they do have custom generated
meta stuff. What I meant to say is that many interior
pages (although indexed) do poorly on relevant keyword
searches, and they get very little search engine referral
traffic, compared to my top-level category pages.

What little traffic those interior pages do get comes
from manual click down, not search engine referral so much.

I'll try the giant sitemap.xml
Maybe that will help.