September 2nd, 2006 by metapilot

With Google steady at the 9000 to 12000 (old-site, supplimental) pages showing for the site:metapilot.com search and up until today showing only two pages from my site (at the very bottom of the all the other supplimental pages), and Yahoo up the page count of the new site by page or two a week, I getting figitty.Google had shown one of the blog pages in that search, but today that is gone and only the home page, indexed Aug. 21, is showing. I’m not at all sure how google found that blog page since it wasn’t until at least a week later that I put any sort of public link to the blog. The only thing I can think of is that in messing around during the installation, and working on making a static home page (coming) I had an index.php page in the root along with the index.html page and somehow that got picked up? Thing is it wasn’t even the index.php page that was indexed, it was an archive page. Anyhow, It’s gone at least for the moment.

Since I am getting figitty, I re-crawled the site with my trusty dusty sitemap tool (I use the one over at auditmypc.com) so that my sitemaps included all the pages currently in the blog. I have two sitemaps, urllist.txt and sitemap.txt because urllist.txt used to be the only filename that Yahoo look when you submitted a sitemap as a feed–that was before Yahoo Site Explorer, which doesn’t clearly define a specific file name. Sitemap.txt is the file name Google suggests if you are using a text file as the sitemap you submit to Google Webmaster Tools and rather than telling Google to look for a file created spefically for Yahoo Sitemapts, I make one with that name too. For the time being it is faster and easier to have these two sitemaps than to figure out the ideal way to have a single one. (Did you get all that?)

So the new sitemaps were submitted to Google and Yahoo yesterday and the domain submitted to MSN, as well. I’m hoping this jogs some changes in the index in the next week or so. Of course, I won’t be able to be sure that this is what caused them but at least, it’s gives the felling of doing something to help push the process along.