Last
week, Google released its new Google
Sitemaps service. Despite the name,
Google Sitemaps is not a tool that
creates sitemaps for your web site.
Google Sitemaps is another way to
submit your web pages to Google.
What is Google Sitemaps?
Google calls it "a beta
'ecosystem' that may help webmasters
with two current challenges:
keeping Google informed about
all of your new web pages or
updates, and increasing the coverage
of your web pages in the Google
index".
Google SiteMaps allows you to
tell Google which web sites it
should crawl and it allows you
to tell Google that the content
on your site has changed.
How do you submit your sitemap
to Google Sitemaps?
The easiest way to submit your
web page URLs to Google Sitemaps
is to create a list of URLs in
plain text format:
http://www.example.com/index.htm
http://www.example.com/page1.htm
http://www.example.com/page2.htm
http://www.example.com/directory/whatever.htm
Enter one URL per line and save
that list with the file ending .xml.
Then login to
Google Sitemaps and upload that
file.
Google also offers a more sophisticated tool (which
is rather complicated) that allows
you to create a sitemap but a plain
list will also do. Third party tools are
also available.
Does this increase your Google
rankings?
No, it doesn't. Using Google Sitemaps
will not influence your rankings.
You just tell Google that your
web pages exist. Google still uses
its normal ranking algorithms to
determine the ranking of your web
pages.
Google even makes no guarantees
about when or if your URLs will
be crawled or added to the index
if you use Google Sitemaps.
What does this mean to your
web site?
Google Sitemaps might be useful
to you if your web pages aren't
crawled by Google's spider. However,
you won't increase your Google
rankings by using Google Sitemaps.
If Google's spider hasn't crawled
your web site yet, your web site
probably doesn't have enough good
incoming links. If your web
site has many good incoming links,
Google's spider will find your
web site anyway.
In addition, good incoming links
tell Google that your web site
is important and that it deserves
high rankings.
Detailed information about Google
Sitemaps can be found on this
page. To make sure that Google
gives your web pages high rankings
after indexing them, take a look
at the recommended
resources.
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