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1. I do not see this feature under Search Engines. Am I too early?

   Comment by Greg — June 28, 2006 #

2. Hi..
   Today I submit my sitemap to Google using the new feature but I receive the following error:

   Unsupported file format Your Sitemap does not appear to be in a supported format. Please ensure it meets our Sitemap guidelines and resubmit.

   Do I need to change another feature so Google Sitemaps will recognize my sitemap ??

   Regards

   Comment by Manuel Ramirez — June 28, 2006 #

3. Which file is compatible with Google Sitemaps?

   objinfo.xml or catalog.xml

   Comment by Menachem — June 28, 2006 #

4. Greg–

   Yes you are too early. Look for it late tonight. Our releases typically go out later in the day to reduce possible impact to merchants if there are any issues. My bad for not putting a time along with the date.

   Manuel–

   Not sure what file you submitted but since the feature isn’t out yet I’m guessing it was one of the two files listed in the above comment. When the feature is released, and you have published Order Settings and the Store Editor, you will have a sitemap.xml file that you can submit.

   Menachem–

   Neither of those files will work. See my comment for Manuel above.

   Paul 

    

   Comment by Administrator — June 28, 2006 #

5. Does this mean Yahoo! will be using Google Sitemaps to inform its own search results?

   Comment by Stephen Newton — June 29, 2006 #

6. […] Yahoo! has launched a new feature that allows integration of Sitemap file into Y! Merchant stores. The Sitemap file contains all pages in your store that were created using the Store Editor.  This includes all products, sections and content pages.  Along with the page URLs, the Sitemap file also contains information on when the file was last updated. How does this help? Here is Yahoo!'s answer- […]

   Pingback by Unofficial SEO Blog » New Feature: Sitemap for Your Store - SEO Information much before its official! — June 29, 2006 #

7. Nice feature but useless for stores using web hosting, not store editor. Need to be able and change url from http://store.yourstorehere.com/sitemap.xml to http://www.yourstorehere.com/sitemap.xml

   Comment by Barry — June 29, 2006 #

8. Grace from Google posted an article about Sitemaps for Yahoo! merchants on the Google Sitemaps blog. Thanks Grace.

   Comment by Administrator — June 29, 2006 #

9. Hi All,

   As discussed on several forums. If you are getting a good number of your pages already ranked in Google this is not necessary but for a new Yahoo Store like ours where we only have the home page listed on Google it is worth it.

   Tip: Make sure you open the Variables section and click Update. Then Publish so it will grab all your webpages for the XML SiteMap

   Have a great July 1st (Canada Day) and July 4th (Independence Day) weekend.

   Nathan…
   AsSeenOnTVChannel.com
   http://www.asseenontvchannel.com

   Comment by Nathan — June 29, 2006 #

10. […] Yahoo! Store blog reported they are introducing a new feature that will enable store owner to create Sitemaps. Merchants should be able to proactively notify search engines about pages in their store by submitting their Sitemap file to programs such as Google Sitemaps. […]

    Pingback by Today’s Tidbits - 30 June 2006 — June 30, 2006 #

11. […] Scopro, da una news su Inside Google Sitemaps, che Yahoo! Merchants ha integrato Google Sitemaps e lo annuncia sul blog. Nel Blog spiega cosa è il servizio, come inserirlo, a cosa serve ed ha creato una sezione apposita per le Features di Sitemap per aiutare i webmaster ad integrarla nei siti ed avere dei vantaggi. Vuoi ricevere gratis le ultime novita’ di Wmtools? Lascia qui la tua email… Tuo Nome E-mail […]

    Pingback by » Yahoo! Merchants e Google Sitemaps - Web Marketing e Posizionamento — July 7, 2006 #

12. […] A new feature: Sitemaps for your store was implemented. […]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Store implements the Google Sitemaps | Cristian Mezei’s SEO Blog — July 9, 2006 #

13. […] Checkout and AdWords » Bookmark on del.icio.us Yahoo! has announced that it is integrating Sitemaps into Y! Merchant stores. Starting today,Yahoo! merchants can automatically create a Sitemap file for their stores and share information about their site with Google and other search engines to improve their visibility online. With this integration, Yahoo! merchants can also easily verify ownership of their stores — so they can create a Google Sitemaps account and benefit from the additional reports and tools that show them Google’s view of their site. […]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Merchants get Sitemaps » Wagalulu - Google » » Yahoo! Merchants get Sitemaps — July 15, 2006 #

14. How can we change http://store.yourstorehere.com/sitemap.xml to http://www.yourstorehere.com/sitemap.xml

    Comment by Sam — August 28, 2006 #

15. Sam,

    Consider that each Yahoo! Merchant Solutions account has two sides in terms of building your store–one on the Store side (published to from the Store Editor) and one on the Web Hosting side (for merchants that wish to use SiteBuilder, Dreamweaver, or any other HTML authoring tool). All accounts now default the “www” traffic (people that visit your domain) to the Web Hosting side, but you can choose to direct your www traffic to the Store side. Consult the following help document for instructions and more information: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/manage/sitesettings/sitesettings-27.html

    Comment by Administrator — August 28, 2006 #

16. Thank you very much for the help about sitemap.
    I do have another questions regarding site explorer.
    I did upload the yahoo authentication key in file manager. and once i keep the domain directed to webhosting it authenticates the web site owner. but if I do change it to store editor(because I created the website through store editor) it doesn’t authenticate the website. I can not keep domain to web hosting site because then it doesn’t show the domain it shows the file manager files etc.

    Please help

    Sam

    Comment by Sam — August 29, 2006 #

17. My website has both the site.yahoo and a http://www. domain name…Since I would like to submit my site to google under the http://www. domain rather than the site.yahoo domain I need to be able to edit my sitemap.xml to say http://www.domainname.net rather than site.domainname.net…Is there any possible way I can do this?

    Comment by Brian — August 29, 2006 #

18. Hi Brian,

    To submit your site to Google under http://www.domainname.com, please take the following steps:
    1. From the Store Manager, click on the ‘Domain Names’ link under Site Settings
    2. Under Yahoo! Domain Redirect Settings, select the domain of your choice (ie. http://www.domainname.com)
    3. Click on ‘Set Redirect’

    Now when you create the sitemap file for your store, it will be created for the domain that you have just specified.

    For more information regarding domain redirect settings, please go to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/context/context-39.html

    Comment by Duncan — August 29, 2006 #

19. In response to Sam’s question regarding ‘How to authenticate with Site Explorer if using Store Editor?’…

    The ability to authenticate with Site Explorer for stores created using Store Editor does not currently exist. The Store team is presently reviewing the different ways to address this opportunity.
    In the mean time, you can still submit your store to Site Explorer without having to authenticate. While you will not have access to the additional data available from authenticating, you can still use Site Explorer to track the coverage and freshness of your site in the Yahoo! Search index.

    Comment by Duncan — August 29, 2006 #

20. Great feature. I’m switching one of my clients over now because of this. Glad I found this page of your blog.

    Comment by Online Marketing — October 30, 2006 #

21. I have read all the posts and I’m still confused. Is it my understanding that to create a sitemap that will work with google I have to switch to the store editor? How about a 3rd party sitemap generator, how would I upload that to my site through sitebuilder?

    Comment by Lee Ann — November 2, 2006 #

22. Early last June I switched from Microsoft Hosting, Microsoft Commerce Manager and FrontPage.

    I switched to Yahoo Hosting, Yahoo Stores and Dreamweaver.

    I completely revamped my site, all new pages, page names, pictures, file names, the works.

    MSN indexes my site as a model for all indexing. It’s perfect. All new pages, zero old, non-existent ones.

    Google does a fair job, I participate with Google Sitemap and use most of their tools. I do get old pages indexed, remove them and they reappear but not to the extent of Yahoo.

    Yahoo, especially in the last two weeks, using their Site Explorer and authentication tool, indexed from 85, to 279, to 301 pages of which 95% are old pages that no longer exist, never existed on Yahoo Stores or Hosting. NEVER!

    I called Yahoo and passed through two support Geeks. They could not explain, however, the last agent upon my suggestion of contacting my Attorney General said, “Thank you for using Yahoo, I am now transferring you to our legal department per your request,” and the elevator music began.

    Does anyone have a constructive answer(s) to this problem? Where could these pages exist that Yahoo insists on avoiding pages that are fresh, on their servers and instead indexing pages that are long gone?

    My sitemaps are clean, my file manage at Yahoo is clean. The fact that Yahoo just began the indexing and is find old files compared to my previous host, Microsoft, who is picking up only valid pages is beyond me.

    Therefore, help getting indexed properly in Yahoo would be extremely beneficial if optimazation and conversion rates are important.

    Thanks,

    Don

    Comment by Don Bistrow — November 28, 2006 #

23. Don,

    If there is a problem with your sitemap that is generated on the store side, please contact our support team (links available in help) to help you resolve this. I don’t think that is the case since you mention Dreamweaver (sitemaps are only auto-generated for Store Editor built sites). Since you have complete control over the files in File Manager, there is no reason old files would be found through crawling, if those files don’t exist in the File Manager.

    It sounds like your issue is unrelated to Store, but rather an issue with Yahoo! Search indexing. My guess would be the index may be showing outdated results and you may just need a fresh crawl of your current site. As such, your comment is better suited to the Site Explorer forums or posted to the Yahoo! Search blog or sent to the Site Explorer feedback form.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — November 30, 2006 #

24. Which file is compatible with Google Sitemaps?

    objinfo.xml or catalog.xml?

    Comment by Starcreatives — December 15, 2006 #

25. Neither objinfo.xml nor catalog.xml are intended to be used in place of a sitemap.xml file. There is a special sitemap.xml file which can be enabled, that follows the SiteMap protocol. Search Help for SiteMap for more information on how to enable this feature.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — December 15, 2006 #

26. Hi adimin, can you help me how to enable sitemap.xml feature ? (I’ve searched on help but there is little confusion)
    thanks

    Comment by posizionamento motori di ricerca — December 16, 2006 #

27. To enable the Sitemap.xml feature, sign in to your account and go to the Search Engines link from the Store Manager. Then, select the enable sitemap.xml option, and publish both the Store Editor and your Order Settings.

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — December 17, 2006 #

28. Do you think the domain name is as important for SEO as the title tag of a webpage? I know that MSN puts a lot of value on the domain name. But what about Google and Yahoo?

    Thank you,

    Robert McCulloch

    Comment by Robert McCulloch — January 17, 2007 #

29. Everything I have read in various SEO forums seems to weight the title tag more so than keywords in a domain. However, a memorable, easy-to-spell domain, certainly has benefits in buyers typing in the address directly (even if typing it into a search engine as a means to navigate to the site).

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — January 17, 2007 #

30. Excellent info. I’m trying a new sitemap now.

    Comment by Dana — April 21, 2007 #

31. its amazing, i submit to google, i did the whole sitemap thing and it still takes months to show up in SEO, yet i can have a site indexed in Yahoo in less than 5 days without even submitting to it. what gives?

    Comment by bryan — June 14, 2007 #

32. Well for me I submitted the sitemap to both Google and Yahoo. Google has indexed most, if not all, of the subpages whereas Yahoo has only indexed less than 5%. It’s been more than 3 months and I still don’t know what went wrong.

    Comment by The Dog Clothing & Dog Collar Company — July 12, 2007 #

33. […] Yahoo! has announced that it is integrating Sitemaps into Y! Merchant stores. Starting today, Yahoo! merchants can automatically create a Sitemap file for their stores and share information about their site with Google and other search engines to improve their visibility online. With this integration, Yahoo! merchants can also easily verify ownership of their stores — so they can create a Google Sitemaps account and benefit from the additional reports and tools that show them Google’s view of their site. […]

    Pingback by Yahoo! Merchants get Sitemaps — August 1, 2007 #

34. Hi! Thank you for the useful info.
    I’ve created the website of my family’s small hotel using yahoo!sitebuilder (no HTML knowledge…)
    I would like to add a sitemap. Could you please give me some help? Are there any differencies between sitebuilder and store in creating sitemaps?
    Thanks in advance.
    GS.

    Comment by Georgios — August 29, 2007 #

35. Georgios,

    Yours is certainly one of the better sites built in SiteBuilder that I have seen–congratulations for your hard work. In terms of sitemaps, when building using the Store Editor, our tool automatically assembles the sitemap.xml file because the system knows the location of pages based on the ID from the product catalog. The same is not true for SiteBuilder where the page name is whatever you set.

    The good news is that there are free tools available to generate a sitemap file that you can use. Do a search for “sitemap generator” and look for the free tools. Then just enter your website url and generate the file. Next, save the file as sitemap.xml and upload to your files in the Web Hosting portion of your account.

    Another approach would be to create your sitemap file by hand since it appears to be a small site and the urls may not change so frequently. Here is an example:

    
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.hotelplataniti.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>


    Inside each <loc> you would add the urls to the pages of your site. You can also read about the sitemap protocol to see what the other entries such as priority and change frequency do. The most important thing though is to include all of your urls in the file.

    Lastly, and on an unrelated note, since you are located in Greece, I hope you are unaffected by the recent wildfires. Looks to be a beautiful area where you are.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — August 29, 2007 #

36. we have created some pages published using design wizard under store manager,now we need undo that pages and want to create the customized pages under web hosting control panel, what we should do now?

    Comment by prabhu tk — September 5, 2007 #

37. Prabhu,

    While there is no “undo” button you can go into the Store Editor and delete all of your product and non-product pages that were created. Then, build your site on the Web Hosting side of your account and go to your domain control panel to switch your Domain Traffic Option to point your www domain traffic to the Web Hosting side of your account.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — September 5, 2007 #

38. thanks paul,

    i have another question, in webhosting control panel under file manager we can see two domains
    1. main domain (www.mydomain.com) and
    2. sub domain (site.mydomain.com).

    we are able to edit only the subdomain but we are not able to edit the main domain files. what we should do to make main domain editable.

    and also request you to tell us the steps to switch the domain traffic under domain control panel,

    thanks for your support and we expect your support to continue further.

    prabhu

    Comment by prabhu tk — September 5, 2007 #

39. hi paul,

    can we integrate the checkout pages created under checkout manager (which connects to payment gateway) with the pages created in web hosting control panel?
    expecting your help….
    thanks

    prabhu

    Comment by prabhu tk — September 5, 2007 #

40. Prabhu,

    I recommend reading through the help which is available for both of these topics:

    Instructions for changing your domain traffic option

    Overview for building a site on the Web Hosting side

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — September 5, 2007 #

41. thanks paul,

    i have seen the links what u have provided, whether can we connect to payment gateway using yahoo in web hosting?

    thanks for your support.

    prabhu

    Comment by prabhu tk — September 5, 2007 #

42. Not sure exactly what your question is. Once you add products in Catalog Manager, you can then use Store Tags to connect your Web Hosting pages to the checkout pages (managed in Checkout Manager). Within your checkout, you can connect a merchant account such as Paymentech or any merchant account able to process with the FDMS Nashville platform. This is the Payment gateway already integrated with Yahoo!–in other words you do not need a payment gateway–just a merchant account or PayPal. I would recommend contacting our Customer Care team from the links within help as they should be able to walk you through all such questions.–Paul

    Comment by pboisver — September 5, 2007 #

43. paul,

    one last question please,

    we are using mysql and php, is the catalog manager is needed in this case?

    1. we need to connect to authorize.net payment gateway.
    2. using php and mysql for creating dynamic pages.
    3. need to build in web hosting side.

    we kindly request you to suggest a solution to connect to payment gateway considering above things.

    prabhu

    Comment by prabhu tk — September 5, 2007 #

44. Prabhu,
    The Catalog Manager is needed because it allows the Store side of your account where checkout is located to know what products exist. In your case though, your requirements are not compatible with the service. We cannot support other gateways in checkout at this time. Also, store tags are incompatible with mysql and php currently. I do not have a recommendation for you for a solution to meet your requirements. I would recommend posting the question on WebMasterWorld or a similar board to get feedback from merchants that had similar requirements.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — September 5, 2007 #

45. Hi Paul, You mentioned that store tags are not compatible with MySQL/PHP. I am assuming that means that we can’t have PHP/MySQL and Tags in the same page? I mean, if we have PHP/MySQL in other pages on the web hosting side, that is ok, right? Thanks!

    Saurin

    Comment by Saurin — September 6, 2007 #

46. Paul,

    (I am on same team as Prabhu above). Sorry for a second run-on question.. We have only one software product (download only) - available on monthly subscription fee. We have set up Authorize.net as the gateway. We want to: (a) capture the user’s address and store it in our my SQL database and (b) setup automatic monthly recurring billing. How do we do this? For (a) should / can we use real time link? and for (b) will we need to use ARB feature of Authorize.net for recurring billing? Is that available thourgh Yahoo or do we connect directly with Authorize.net for that? Thanks!!

    Saurin

    Comment by Saurin — September 6, 2007 #

47. Saurin,
    Yes that is fine. Both are server side actions so only one can execute on a page at a time. For example, a product page with Store Tags (and no PHP or MySQL) and a content page using PHP or MySQL (and no Store Tags) would be fine. You could even hard code your add to cart/checkout links and avoid Store Tags altogether if you so choose.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — September 6, 2007 #

48. Saurin,

    You can use the functionality to post the order to your own server which will give you access to all of the order information (more info). That said, since you are using another gateway you will not be able to process order in real-time in the checkout, which I assume would be a requirement especially with downloadable goods that are received immediately. Since you only have one product I would recommend looking into using PayPal which has a recurring subscription functionality and downgrading to a Web Hosting only package. You have a very specific use case which does not require all of the features of a Yahoo! store.

    Also, while I try to answer all questions on this blog, your questions are really specific to your needs and are not specific to this thread, so I would ask that you submit further questions to our customer care group.

    Paul

    Comment by pboisver — September 6, 2007 #

49. I want to create a store in yahoo shopping.Plz help me……………

    Comment by sunil — November 10, 2007 #

50. I originally had my perfume site on Yahoo. I tried to do the rhmtl. I am considering moving back since i have more knowledge about everything.

    Comment by Trevia - perfect perfume — November 29, 2007 #

51. Paul,

    I just found this page when doing a search for PHP not working with Yahoo Store Tags. If the issue of PHP not working with Store Tags was relatively new I’d only be slightly disappointed, but I found this link: http://www.phpbuilder.com/board/archive/index.php/t-10278999.html which describes the same problem and is dated from 2004! It’s been over 3 years since people have asked for this (seemingly) simple ability. Is there some staggering hurdle in the way here or is it simply a matter of it being an extremely low priority?

    -Chris

    Comment by Chris — January 24, 2008 #

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