Why can't Google find my Website Address

[#1]

So it's important to fire off a sitemap to Google occasionally?
Do they take any notice though?

[#2]

Sorry if I offended you, I didnt have time to read all the wiki article, but it seemed to be saying put all your url's in one place so that the crawler doesnt have to hunt all over the place to find them

Quote

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol, and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. Sitemaps are particularly beneficial in situations     * When users cannot access all areas of a website through a browse able interface. In these cases, a search engine can't find these pages. For example, a site with a large "archive" or "database" of resources that aren't well linked to each other (if at all), only accessible via a search form.     * Where webmasters use rich Ajax or Flash, and search engines can't navigate through to get to the content.

[#3]

Quote from: axisofevil

So it's important to fire off a sitemap to Google occasionally? Do they take any notice though?

They actually do.
I checked my Google report and it flagged up an error with the sitemap (I had deleted a page and hadn't altered it). Downloading a new copy and Google rechecked within a couple of days.

[#4]

Quote from: axisofevil

So it's important to fire off a sitemap to Google occasionally?

That depends. For me - I have circa 120 pages on my site and I don't want Google crawling them regularly when I know a large number of them won't change, so I set the frequency. I also set the priorty high for key pages so that if Google is going to show a result from my site it'll choose one of those. In my experience (Others may differ) - it does work quite well.

Quote from: axisofevil

Do they take any notice though?

Indeed.

[#5]

You need to submit a sitemap.xml to google (and also save a plain text sitemap.txt on your server, listing your webpages for other search engines like yahoo!) the first time you publish your website.  Thereafter you need to resubmit to google your sitemap.xml only when you add new webpages or update any of your existing webpages.
The robots.txt is to point web crawlers to pages you want indexed by search engines and to block web crawlers from visiting/indexing pages or directories/files you do NOT want listed;  e.g. your individual images, personal files, etc.
Search engines consider the contents of both sitemap.xml and robots.txt files in their indexing of your website.
HTH.

[#6]

Quote from: MickKi

You need to submit a sitemap.xml to google (and also save a plain text sitemap.txt on your server, listing your webpages for other search engines like yahoo!)

Actually Yahoo! and MSN Live are perfectly happy with an XML sitemap.

[#7]

You're right of course!  I was writing that from memory (it ain't what it used to be . . .)  It is Google that can ingest sitemap.txt as well as sitemap.xml.  Yahoo! and MSN work with sitemap.xml.  I got into the habit of using both, just in case.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34654