Is Google's Sitemaps For You?

By Aisling Brennan
Online Marketing Account Manager

One of the releases from Google that caught my attention was the recent launch of Google's Sitemaps program.

At first glance everything seems pretty straightforward: download a script which generates a Sitemap-formatted file, place that on your Webserver, and hey presto, Google's crawlers can then effectively find and read new and existing content.

This sounds like great news, right? Especially if you've ever wondered when Google's crawlers were going to visit your site to read and index the new content you've painstakingly added.

Well for some it will most certainly be, most notably those large, dynamic sites that have trouble getting their pages indexed. It'll definitely be worth the effort involved. And there is effort involved: a new file needs to be generated every time a page on the site is updated. For some this process could become quite arduous.

However if you have a smaller site, with fewer than a hundred pages of content, you mightn't necessarily benefit from using this tool at all. If your site is search engine friendly, with an abundance of relevant content, HTML-based navigation and numerous internal links, there's really no need to go to all this trouble. The pages will be easily found and read by all the search engine crawlers as is.

From what I can see, Google's Sitemaps tool will be very useful for some, whilst a little redundant for others. Determine (via your server logs) if your website is being crawled on a regular basis and if your pages are being updated in the index. If so, there shouldn't be any need to participate in this program. Thus giving you more time to concentrate on adding even more content to the site.