Sitemap created on client's Joomla site but it is not showing up on site reports as existing? (Thumbs Up To Answers)

[Atlanta-SMO]

I am working with a web developer who built our client's site in Joomla.  I seem to have a lot of issues with Joomla based sites.  Any how, the site is www.pitgearusa.com and when we run site reports it is showing there is no xml sitemap. However he used a popular Joomla plugin for sitemaps called Xmap. Here is their url: http://www.jooxmap.com/

Can anyone provide any advice on what the website developer needs to do in order for the xml sitemap to function and "show up" on reports?

Thanks

Mashed Up

[Dr-Pete]

I know of no valid reason not to use Google Webmaster Tools - there's way too much paranoia on this subject, IMO. If you're knowingly doing something extremely black-hat, then maybe, but Google can detect most of that without GWT. GWT isn't adding any kind of tracking to your site - it's just revealing to you what they already know, for the most part.

The nice thing about GWT is that it can help validate the XML sitemap and, once validated, help you figure out what's getting indexed.

I suspect these other tools are just looking for some default name for the file, and you're using a non-default one. You can map it, as Thomas said, or you can just tell Google what the filename is. Beyond the SEs, I'm not sure who really needs to process your XML sitemap.

[Atlanta-SMO]

I have been running on sites like seorch and other sites and they all show "no xml sitemap found"

I heard using Google web tools is not a good idea.

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, when you say "run site reports", are you referring to Google Webmaster Tools? You'll have to either submit that dynamic URL to GWT or use a work-around, as Thomas mentioned, to map it to something a but more standard. For GWT, they don't care what the filename is (I've submitted dynamic, PHP-based sitemaps). For other tools, it's possible the tool is looking for a specific filename.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I normally would not say anything except it took an extraordinarily long time that the site to load. You might want to look into it here is a Google page speed test, web speed and Pingdom test

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140201_DD_64R/

http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pitgearusa.com%2F&tab=desktop

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ehGE9b/http://www.pitgearusa.com/

&

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bch36N/http://www.pitgearusa.com/

my $.02 is put the site on a VPS you can get a $5 Digital Ocean SSD VPS that will allow you to run Google page speed and Nginx ( requires 1/8 of the ram Apache does)

allowing you to speed up your site without increasing your hosting budget.

Another good host is Linode

I know it's off subject, but I hope it helps.

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

I think you just have to change out the htaccess file information with what is described completely in the link but outlined here.

http://www.jooxmap.com/documentation/6-howto-xmap-as-sitemap-xml.html

Xmap generates the sitemap dynamically every time the sitemap is visited so it can always provide a really up to date list of links. That's the reason why there is no such sitemap.xml file. But there is a workaround for this using your .htaccess file.

this tool allows you to create a Sitemap index if I were you I would use the link above and scroll now to where it talks about site map index file you can create a site map index file with this tool and that is a better site map for search engines

Add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/sitemap.xml
RewriteRule .* /index.php?option=com_xmap&id=1&view=xml

After that, you can visit your XML sitemap using a URL like this:

http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

I also made a Nginx config file in case you're using that instead of Apache htaccess file

nginx configuration location /sitemap.xml { rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?option=com_xmap&id=1&view=xml; }

Hope this helps,

Thomas

PS if you're running Nginx Instead of Apache converter tool is http://winginx.com/htaccess