Sitemapper making link to folders,...

User 148577 Photo


Registered User
48 posts

What is the command or procedure to tell Sitemapper to not make links to folders?

My Sitemap has links to all the files I want, but also to the folders that contain files. When clicked, the reader gets a message saying they don't have permission to go there. And, I wonder if this is going to hurt search engine ranking because of dead end links?

Any tips on how to stop Sitemapper from creating a link to the folders that contain html files?

Thanks,

Toni
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User 562592 Photo


Registered User
2,038 posts

Related to dead links the answer is yes, dead links will always hurt your search ratings. It can cause the googlebot to give up on your website (because it gets lost) and moves on to the next website. Dead links will quickly decline your page rank within Google. If you want to keep the links what you will want to do is change your redirect.
The philosopher has not done philosophy until he has acted upon the mere conviction of his idea; for proof of the theory is in the act, not the idea.

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User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

I was going to start a new thread, but this one basically is the same thing. I just ran my sitemapper and it's uploaded now (I'll probably try putting the old one back or something but we'll see). My problem is that now my sitemap is full of at least a dozen or so links that lead to 404 errors due to it mapping the folders as well as the pages. Is there nothing we can do to stop this? Are we at the mercy of having to manually pull these out? It's a whole lot of work to be sure, if we have to do this manually every time we run a new sitemap. I love the new looks, but it's not so great if the search engines are finding more than a dozen links that lead to 404 errors due to being folders not actual page links.

Hopefully there's some way around this, I tried doing the settings for which page to have them show on, but of course it blocks out all it's child links if you turn off a page link. What can we do about this?
User 103173 Photo


VP of Software Development
0 posts

Have you tried just adding those files and folders to the ignore list?
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User 562592 Photo


Registered User
2,038 posts

There's Scott trying to make everything sound so simple. ;)
The philosopher has not done philosophy until he has acted upon the mere conviction of his idea; for proof of the theory is in the act, not the idea.

My Web Development Company: http://www.innovatewebdevelopment.com (Created with Coffee Cup Software).

My Personal Website: http://www.EricSEnglish.com

User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

lol yes, but when I add a folder to an ignore list it takes the whole folder and child links with it which we don't want.
User 103173 Photo


VP of Software Development
0 posts

They why not ignore the file instead of the folder?
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User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

Well the files are what I need it to use aren't they? I want the links, such as the blog posts, but I surely don't need a 404 error page that is being picked up because the blog post is in a category which it's picking up the category as a "page" or folder. So if I "ignore" or mark them to not be in either the html or xml they set the whole folder and it's contents to not be shown instead of just that page/folder. Check out the sitemap on my site and you'll see what I mean... I hope lol. Right now it's the one I uploaded last night which includes everything that the sitemapper spit out. There's quite a few of those links on that sitemap that should just not be included, but I see no way other than manually to remove them without it removing the whole section that the page/folder contains. I hope that makes sense.

http://accessoriesoftheworld.com/sitemap.html

Everything that has Page or Author or Topics is a 404 error page. Might be more I haven't checked every single one yet lol.
User 103173 Photo


VP of Software Development
0 posts

If I remember correctly Jo Ann, those 404 pages are being picked up because of the way we stored the id's in Shopping Cart Creator. That has been fixed in the new version of Shopping Cart Creator that we are about to release.
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User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

no those are easy to remove and ya I knew that update was coming for that, but the problems aren't with the shopping cart area they are with the wordpress blog area.

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