Do you support Google sitemaps?

Google sitemaps are often misunderstood as a means to achieve higher ranking for web pages on Google. This is not the case. Google sitemaps are primarily to allow Google to index pages that cannot be reached via regular links on the website, i.e. to overcome the problems associated with database-driven content management systems, javascript links, frames and so on.

123Live generates regular HTML pages with regular HTML links, so any search engine will be able to find all of the pages by following links on the site.

To quote from Google:

"Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users cannot reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface. (Generally, this is when users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links).

Please note that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs.

Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes. (Note that using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google.)"

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is similarly misinterpreted. Read more about the Robots meta tag and robots.txt file.

A site map page

For a small additional cost we can include a 'site map' page on your website which will automatically generate a page with all of your pages listed. Some of our customers have reported that this appears to help to get all of their pages listed in Google quicker than usual. Other clients do not have this facility but still get excellent results.

A site map page can be useful to your visitors as an alternative means of navigation, particularly if you have a large number of pages.