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We get busy. It happens. I know because it happens to me. I have a routine I usually go through at the start and the end of the day. It varies little, making sure everything is up and running for the hours I’m shut down.
Sometimes though a piece of that routine gets clipped. Maybe it isn’t checking the hittail search results for a few days. Sometimes it isn’t logging into the Google Webmaster Tools and that is the one I want to encourage you to check daily.
I use a Google sitemap generator plugin which generates a new sitemap with every new post and pings Google. I still manually submit it most of the time, but not always. It had been several days since I had checked the Webmaster Tools and I was surprised when I logged in to find the Lab’s sitemap had ERRORS!.
I had just published a post which would generate a new sitemap so I hand submitted it. A few minutes later it came back with ERRORS and a strong suggestion to verify the sitemap before submitting it again.
I loaded the sitemap file into a browser and it showed errors as well. Rather than try and spend time finding them, which I would if I had too, I went to the plugin option page and hand generated a sitemap. This one validated and I submitted it. In a few minutes it returned a status of OK.
But what if I hadn’t checked. What if my sitemap was sitting out there for weeks or a month and had errors in it. Probably a glitch during the read write. But whatever the cause it isn’t a good thing to overlook.
Sometimes it is the nail in the tire that brings the whole car to a halt.
This is the Monday morning reminder. Put this on your list “Check Google Webmaster Tools” and don’t forget routine maintenance is as important as increasing performance.
Post Tags: Google Webmaster Tools , routine maintenace , sitemap
Technorati Tags: Google Webmaster Tools , routine maintenace , sitemap
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Charles // Apr 21, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Yup, GOOGLE is not perfect. Great idea for a t-shirt…anyway back on point. Big G has been acting strangely, they must be up to something big. I noticed in webmaster tools they had lists of unreachable urls but when I clicked them I had already set up a 301. Could be an error on my server as well I suppose…but it never hurts to check things every now and then.
2 Dave Smith // Apr 21, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Charles,
LOL Big G is never at rest, that’s one thing I like about them, at the same time it mean none of are at rest. We just hold our breath and wait for the next set of rapids.
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