Hi,
I am a rookie who has just started using your Sitemap Generator. I continue to appreciate it more as I learn more and I have spent some time looking at previous question/answers. Thank you very much for this tool.
I have some very basic questions:
1) I have lots of duplicate (+) pages showing up and I am not sure if this is normal or if something is wrong. Many of them are shown as different levels, for example:
www.giveashare.com/2PartDelivery.shtml
www.giveashare.com/../2PartDelivery.shtml
www.giveashare.com/../../2PartDelivery.shtml
I do not know if it has anything to do with it, but I use an Include file for my header which contains many hyperlinks with “../” .
2) I have read many of the posts and still am unclear about whether I should include images in my sitemap. I have a lot of images on my website and when I included them in the SiteGenerator, I got some funny looking entries that repeated the image directory in the url, for example: www.giveashare.com/images/images/images/images/images/starbucksstock.jpg It would show 6 or 7 entries for the same image with the only difference being one more repetition of “image/”
Any ideas?
Hello Romanorus and welcome to the forum!
Yes, the duplicates are from .. / .
You are using relative urls. If you use an include that incudes another file that also references ../ or ./, then you could end up with what you are getting.
When you run the sitemap, look for the file that doesn’t exist and click on the + next to the entry and you’ll see the pages that link to this invalid file. Go to one of those pages and there you will find out what is causing the problem.
Let me know what you find – or if you need more info.
Regards,
Jim.
Thanks for the quick answer.
Yes, I did look at some of the pages that are causing the ../ duplicates. Each of the pages themselves do not have a hyperlink to the page with a ../ BUT the Include page Header and the Include page Footer which is called into virtually every page on the website has hyperlinks that begin with ../ because they need to be able to find the right file regardless of what level they are on.
So if the ../ problem is coming from my Include Header and Footer, can I simply leave things that way they are and simply remove the duplicates from the sitemap, or would this negative impact me??
If it negatively impacts me, I need to either hard code each hyperlink with the address and put "giveashare.com/" or I can have an Include file for each level.
Thanks
Inside my includes, I make sure to use absolute urls when possible. For example, my navigation uses .. rather than ../
I just took a look at your code from your main page and it has multiple head, body and other statements that should only appear once. There is no question that these items will impact your ranking!
Change your includes to refer to absolute urls and then we’ll look at it again.
To see for yourself, search for <head> and see how many times it appears.
Regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
Are you referring to the number of <Head> that show up when you do a view source?
I assume that you are and I see several. I think that this is because the main page has a <Head> section and that each included file has some. Sounds like the include files should NOT have the <head>section. Is that correct??
Thanks
Rick
Correct Rick,
Your title tag, keywords and other <head> information usually stays outside of an include, unless, you are pulling such information from a database, in which case you’ll want to create one include file called header.[extension] and in that file, place your header information. That file should only be called once.
Regards,
Jim.
Hi Jim,
Thanks to your tool and advice, I think I am making a lot of progress. I have made the changes to use absolute references in the include files, handled most of the mixed capitalization issues and removed the redundant tags that resulted from the include files.
I seem to have a lot of javascript in some of the files that sometimes causes Title, Meta tags and content to be further down on the page. Does this negatively impact me?
Rick
Hi Rick,
I try to place my scripts into a file and then call that file whenever possible. It won’t do anything for page load times, but it may help the bots.
You do want your page as lean as possible, but if you made the corrections to the page format as we talked about, you’ll find your page will load at least 300% faster and your rankings will improve as well!
Let me know once you have everything all set and I’ll take a look.
Best regards,
Jim.