[TosaInu]

Hello djbaxter,

Thank you for replying.

Originally Posted by djbaxter

No. Why do you have all those duplicates? Updates to the sitemap should overwrite the old files, not create brand new ones.

It doesn't make duplicate files in the directory. The googlebot seems to download them several times (within an hour, so they are not updated ones).

If you created a subdomain for your forum, why would you then create a subfilder in that subdomain to install it? It would seem far more logical to install the forum in the root. You're making things unnecessarily complicated.

Because I can't create subdomains myself. The host is doing that and I have only a few. So, I have to put several things on one subdomain to prevent a cluttering and clash of names.

Second, the instructions as to where to find the sitemap need to be in the root directory unless you otherwise specifiy where to find them using the sitemap declaration in a robot.txt file in the root directory. In your case, the root directory is forum.mysite.com/ not forum.mysite.com/vb/.

Hmm, thus the .htaccess supplied with this hack needs to be in forum.mysite.com and not forum.mysite.com/vb? But how comes google seems to be downloading the sitemap?
And that means I have to change the .htaccess a bit from

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

to:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^((urllist|sitemap).*\.(xml|txt)(\.gz)?)$ vb/vbseo_sitemap/vbseo_getsitemap.php?sitemap=$1 [L]

Right?

I believe that was only when Yahoo was using the text format. Now that they're using the XML format like everyone else, it's all automatic. I've never done a manual notification.

Ok.

It depends on how often you run the sitemap generator. Check your cron files.

The default one, I recall it's once a day.

Any errors will be noted in your Webmaster Central account - check there to find out what's wrong.

No errors are reported.

They are. Ignore this part for now. You have enough to figure out already and you certainly don't want to complicate it any further by messing with that setting.

Ok, the problem is just with the location of the .htaccess I guess?