Google Sitemaps Review
You are an SEO; you want to know what Google’s search crawlers see, what errors the spider encounters, how it views and responds to your robots.txt, and most of all, you want to help it find more of your pages. Google Sitemaps has evolved over the past year and now offers helpful tools that webmasters should be using. SEO Chat spoke to Google about the services, so read on to see more.
Google Sitemaps keeps Google's search results fresh. It helps them to deliver the most recent pages to searchers, but webmasters certainly benefit from it too. With a little extra work, sites have more visibility on Google, and they can push information at the same time as pulling statistics and errors to help increase indexing.
Sitemaps helps both new and existing sites improve their Google presence. It can help new sites with few links get more extensive crawls when Googlebot visits, and large sites with PageRank should see deeper crawls and speedier page discovery by showing Googlebot the layout of their site. Google representatives reviewed the highlights of the service for us and answered some questions.
To Create and Submit a Sitemap
So you're intrigued by the idea of a Google Sitemap, and you want to build one. Great! I'd rather spend time talking about the features you get out of the service, but suffice it to say all you need to use the service is a Google account. If you have Gail, you can use that identity to establish a sitemap. Just visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps.
In this beta period, there are also some limitations as to how many sitemaps and URLs you can submit. You can submit 200 sitemaps. If you have more than that, you can add them to a sitemap file, which can contain up to 50,000 URLs. Despite having 15 sites and hundreds of thousands of URLs, all of Developer Shed's sitemaps are in the same account. The limitations shouldn't stop anyone if they don't stop our network.
Site OverviewIn the site overview, you can see that you're able to download the information as a .csv (comma separated value) file. Google has added this feature to most of their data in the service so you can collect to information and use it more flexibly. For example, you could use the .csv in a script to help track your statistics.
After we have logged in and entered SEO Chat's sitemap, Google displays all the information in a tidy tabbed interface. The first tab, Sitemaps, shows us a few basic details of our sitemap file.
If there were errors in our sitemap, Google would tell us via the Sitemap Status. Also, they obviously show how frequently our sitemap is downloaded as Google watches it for changes. Google seems to watch the frequency of changes and considers it when deciding how often it crawls.
The XML sitemaps use open standards on the creative commons license, so Google has left the format open for other search engines to use the same file. Right now Yahoo! only appears to use text files full of URLs, but maybe the Google sitemap file will be useful for reporting links to other engines like Y! eventually. It can't hurt to be ready.
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