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Hi there, Thanks for participating in the survey You're absolutely right - with such a long history there are always going to be some dodgy links that turn up without you having any idea what motivated those webmasters to do that. Already some interesting insights coming out of the survey. Looking forward to sharing the results. Sha

Oops! I forgot to mention Mozcon! I think Cyrus Shepard pretty much summed up the value of the event in his recent blog post I'll be at Mozcon 2012. Will you?. If you can make it to Seattle in July I'll see you there too Sha

Thanks Keri, Yep, it was the Db I was searching for, but the site was a GoDaddy install and was moved to different server because of software install issues. So, having checked Wayback, Google cache and searched through the files without finding a Database, I think I can just refill my mug and settle in to write some new content. To be honest, that's not really so bad - I'd rather start from scratch than rewrite bad copy any day! Less than a dozen pages, so its all good. Most importantly, I now know that I am still sane and not as stupid as I was starting to fear, so thanks for helping resolve that! Have a great weekend! Sha

I have a sitemap.php on my sites. The file contains the php code which generates my xml sitemap. It is perfectly standard and common practice. The question for your programmer is, where is the output xml file located? A sitemap program will output the file to the same location each time it is updated. He should be able to provide you a link to the file. I would advise the URL to be placed somewhere like mydomain.com/sitemap directory. If a deeper directory is preferred, then add the location to robots.txt. Either way it cannot hurt to update the sitemap in Google WMT. With that said, it is not necessary to do so as long as you can confirm Google is getting the information.

That's great to hear Sha. Sometimes it's not so easy to figure out the cause, sometimes it's just knowing where to look. And yes, a 1200 to 1 link to root ratio isn't very healthy at all

Good Answer and a great article on your site too! Kudos!

Glad to be of help Sha

Aran has pretty much hit the nail on the head, the main purpose of a sitemap from a SEO point of view is to submit it to Google Webmaster tools to help Google find all of the pages on your website. Of course sitemaps are also useful from a users point of view and helps people to quickly find a page on your site. I would defiantly recommend you stick to one sitemap per domain. Regarding redirects - these should help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Thanks for your responses Alan. Since these are client sites, it is our policy to seek permission before sharing information about site status. I will do this and provide some examples once permission has been obtained.