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I got an e-mail recently from someone very concerned that his product catalog does not have links to every page on his site from his sitemap, although he has a complete link structure emanating from his home page. Should he beat his programmer about the face and body until he creates a proper sitemap?

Seems like we’ve been getting a lot of questions on sitemaps recently, and I’ll try to cover different ground than Diane Aull covered recently.

Diane talked about whether it’s a problem if you’re missing a sitemap (and the bigger problem in getting scammed to create one), but my reader had a different question. He has an old sitemap out there that contains 40 or so links, but his catalog now has 60,000 pages. Will this screw everything up?

First off, a sitemap is not required for search engines to crawl your site. If your pages are designed properly, Google and friends will happily add your pages to their indexes.

But what about a sitemap that’s plain wrong, like this one? What happens then?

There’s an easy way to figure out if you’ve got a problem. Check to see if your pages are indexed. If those catalog pages are already being indexed, then you have nothing to be concerned about, so just delete the sitemap from you server and don’t give it another thought.

But do you know how to tell if your pages are indexed? You need to check each search engine separately, which you can do with the site: operator. Search for “site:yourdomain.com” and you’ll see all the pages indexed. If you have 60,000 pages, like my buddy, the best you can do is spot-check with this method by using the site: operator naming specific pages in different parts of your site.

For Yahoo!, there’s a better method, Yahoo! Site Explorer. Like the site: operator, you can see how many pages are indexed, but you can also export up to 1000 pages to an external file for more analysis. By working your way through the search engines’ results lists, you can see which pages are indexed and which are not.

So, rather than becoming fixated with sitemaps, keep your eye on the ball. Test to see if your pages are indexed in each of the search engines you are targeting. If you have pages missing, there are many things you can do to fix the problem–that’s when you start considering a sitemap.

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by Jennifer Laycock

For as long as there have been web sites, people have posted their thoughts, opinions and rants about people and companies and for as long as there have been search engines, consumers have found and read those thoughts. While it’s been several years since companies began to realize the value of tracking and managing their reputations online, the explosion of social media has made online reputation management more complex and necessary than it’s ever been before.

In this six part series, I’ll be exploring six valuable lessons you can learn from the classic story of Pinocchio and offering up some input on how to apply it to your own marketing plans. If you are just joining the series, catch up on past articles:

Six Lessons from a Wooden Boy: Part One: Search Engines Want to be Real Boys

Why Online Reputation Management Matters

Let’s think about why the things people say about you online matter. Back in 2005, I wrote a post called “Online Reputation Management, Are You Doing It?” In that post, I explained it like this:

Imagine that you’ve just left a business meeting with a potential client. You’ve pitched your services, impressed them with your portfolio and given them a competitive pricing bid. You’ve all but sealed the deal and are confident that with a follow-up call, you’ll have them signing the paperwork and faxing the contract over to your office.

Now imagine that you are the client. After a great meeting and a proposal that sounds great, you decide to run a quick search online for the company that just pitched you. You run their name through Google or Yahoo! and there, just under the company’s web site is a link to a message board. You click the link and find a posting by a disgruntled customer that claims to have had a bad experience with the company you are considering hiring. Is that search result going to taint your opinion of the company you were ready to sign a contract with? Chances are high that it will.

Of course these days it’s never as simple as one web page with one opinions. No…these days what we find are blog posts with long strings of comments, or daisy chained blog posts that refer to the original complaint and pile new complaints on top. We see these posts getting picked up and tossed around social media services like Twitter and Facebook and we see companies rise and fall in hours as the social media hordes decide whether to worship or vilify the company of the moment.

For Better or for Worse…

Sometimes, managing your online reputation is about slowing down or stopping negative momentum before it reaches the mainstream press. The makers of painkiller Motrin learned this lesson just last month after posting a fairly controversial ad aimed at baby-wearing mothers.

You can get a great recap of what happened from Laura Fitton, including a video with the compiled Twitter posts on the topic. The impact, though short lived, was huge. Jeremiah Owyang breaks down the numbers on his blog.

Granted, the story did get picked up by the New York Times parenting blog and by USA Today and both of those results now show in the top ten for a search on “Motrin” but the results could have been far worse.

Of course the impact of positive talk about your company can be just as strong. I’ve written in the past about the I Heart Zappos blog post and the impact a single post by a single person had on spreading the word and increasing good will about an online company.

So Where Does Pinocchio Fit In?

So at this point you’re thinking “that’s nice Jen, but what does Pinocchio have to do with all this?” Well, let’s consider Pinocchio and that fast growing tree branch of a nose he had. When Pinocchio told a lie, his nose grew longer. The more lies he told, the bigger (and more obvious) his nose (and the lies) became.

That’s a valuable lesson for companies looking to be involved in the conversation online because one of the single most important qualities any company needs to succeed online is honesty. Whether it’s being transparent about who you are and what your motivations are when contacting bloggers or owning up to the mistakes you’ve made and doing your best to correct them, honesty will get a company further in social media than just about any other tactic out there.

Tell a lie, misrepresent reality or fail to address legitimate concerns and the problem will grow as noticeable and become as much of a nuisance as Pinocchio’s nose.

People Are Savvy

Consumers are becoming more and more savvy these days. They have the resources to research almost anything they want to and they have legions of other consumers to gather input and opinions from. Self appointed watch dogs can bring a company to its knees. On the other hand, self appointed evangelists can send a company soaring.

Look at Dell and Walmart and how each company has handled themselves online. While Dell started off shakily, their turn-around is one of the most well documented social media success stories on the history of the web. Why? Because they understood the value of being credible, authentic and consistent. On the other hand, brands like Walmart have failed to find social media success time and time again because they continue to rely on self-centered, manufactured messages that are inconsistent and ultimately prove the company to be untrustworthy.

In the next installment in the series we’ll take a look at the realm of social media and why Pinocchio’s experience of growing a donkey tail and ears can teach you a valuable lesson.

Flick creative commons license photo credit: Llawliet

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