By Alli Summerford
April 15, 2006
Google has released its beta version of a new program called Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps (GS) is a tool that allows site owners to upload a sitemaps file (a file with a complete list of the pages of a web site) that Google will use to ensure that your site is crawled in its entirety. For web sites that have had trouble getting Google’s attention, this may be a great opportunity.
This is how Google describes the program on its web site:
“Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.”
In addition to a deeper crawl/index of your site, GS provides valuable information that can alert you to problems with your site that may be blocking your search engine success. The statistics information that is available with GS includes:
- Crawl errors
- Search queries that return your site in the results
- What Google knows about your site
- Indexing information
- Information about violations of the webmaster guidelines
- robots.txt validation
This is a new and unique opportunity to get concrete information about your site that can translate directly into better visibility across all the major search engines, not just Google. And, best of all, participation in this new program is free.
Click to learn more about Google Sitemaps.
If you are interested in using this program with your web site, please contact us. We are happy to assist you in taking advantage of this opportunity.
