Google Sitemaps (BETA)

Once again, Google has added a new feature, and this time it is: Google Sitemaps.

Currently, you do not need to have a Google account to participate, and Google has posted a very informative help file about its sitemaps feature at:

Google Sitemaps (BETA) Help

Basically, Google states that the reason for doing sitemaps is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible” and that “this collaborative crawling system will allow our crawlers to optimize the usefulness of Google's index for users by improving its coverage and freshness.”

Apparently, page ranking will not be influenced by the inclusion of a sitemap. Or not yet? Consider the following: A sitemap, in the way in which Google uses it, is simply an XML document, detailing the structure of your web site. However, one of the XML tags listed in the Google Sitemap Protocol used in this document is called priority and another one is called changefreq (and there are several others). So, it is conceivable (and very likely) that those XML tags will aid Google’s crawlers in indexing as well as in ranking a web site’s pages — even if it only does so indirectly.

If, for instance, I give a certain web page on my web site a high priority and indicate that it be crawled always, I would speculate that I may indeed optimize my web site by encouraging the Google crawlers to pay special attention to a certain web page. Of course, this hypothesis is neither officially supported nor alluded to by Google, and all of this is still in BETA. However, it seems to me that adding a Google sitemap to your web site and registering it with Google would have some SEO-related benefits in the long run.

Even if it “only” helps Google index your web site better and more accurately, chances are you are at least one step ahead of those web sites who do not take the time to do so.

Finally, Google’s sitemap allows for the inclusion of dynamically generated content, as long as it is encoded properly. This is a great feature, since your ordinary search engine crawler does not usually grab such URLs. Here is an example:

<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/
catalog?item=1&amp;desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>

Google has a simple example of a sitemap available, and if you prefer to modify the XML by hand, you can do so. And if you’re running Python on your web server, you can even download Google’s sitemap generator and let it do all the work for you.