Google Sitemaps Explained

By Tom Daly

Account Executive

Google Sitemaps is a new free tool that helps Webmasters diagnose potential problems, gets their sites more Google-friendly, and ultimately ensures the website is read, indexed and ranked by Google Search.

With Google Sitemaps, you can instantly inform Google of every page on your website that is available for crawling. Simply send Google a list of URL’s from your site via an XML file. This Sitemap file can include settings for each URL including their priority, how often they need to be updated and their last modified date thus enabling the search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

With Google Sitemaps, you can have the most recent version of your URLs indexed in Google at all times. It is for this reason that Sitemaps works best for Webmasters who frequently update their website content. For example, a website with ten pages of content that is rarely updated, already listed in Google's index, isn't going to benefit from setting up Google Sitemaps. It's particularly useful in situations when it is difficult for users to access all areas of a website through the browseable interface. For example, a database-driven site only accessible via a search form will prove very difficult for the search engines to crawl. With Google Sitemaps, the Webmaster can now generate a sitemap XML feed containing all accessible URLs and submit it to search engines. Large sites can also benefit from Sitemaps if some of their pages have yet to be crawled.

Smaller websites will be able to create and maintain their Sitemap manually however for larger websites, automation is best. There are a number of tools available to help with creating your Sitemap, e.g. VIGOS GSitemap. When it comes to submitting your sitemap to Google, the process is straightforward: You can upload the XML file to your root and point Google in the right direction.

Implementing Google Sitemaps is simple and usually worth the effort. Even better, all the major search engines have agreed on a standard format. So now when you get your Sitemaps XML feed is ready for Google, it is also ready for submission to Yahoo! and MSN.