Importance of Site Maps w/Google

I use it for several of our sites. I have to say that I think it is a very worth while tool. It doesn't help you get listed any higher, but it does help you to help Google find all the pages in your site.

I don't know if it "officially" speeds up your ranking, but from experience, I have found that it definitly speeds up the listing of new pages in an existing site.

It is also a good tool for letting you see link errors etc etc.

One other interesting use .... one of our sites was actually de-listed from Google during the summer. We have gone from PR 7 to PR 0 and, while we have sent many emails and made many changes, we have still had no reply from Google as to why we were de-listed.

Looking through Google sitemaps interestingly shows us that our site IS getting crawled a lot and it DOES still have an excellent PR. We obviously just have to twiddle our thumbs until we re-appear in the listings.

We set up a sitemap a few months back, but had to delete it after our auto email prog went beserck! Instead of sending out mails once a week or whatever, it was sending them out once a minute! Probably our fault for not excluding the email files, but just letting you know, so you make sure it's done properly!

webboy1 & Eazygoin,

Thanks for the info.

I'm not clear on something. Does Google's Site Map program send a XLM file to Google or does is it made available on my site?

You have to create a sitemap in XML format. The Google Sitemaps pages exaplain how to do this fairly easily.

Once you have done this, you then have to submit it to register it with Google. Google then provide you with instructions.

These instructions will include instrcutions to create a file called something like Google444h4456ll.htm and place it on your server.

From within your sitemap pages you can then hit Verify. Google then checks your sitemap and uses the above mentioned .htm file to make sure the sitemap file is your and is on your servers.

A fairly general explanation, but I hope it helps.

Thanks for the explanation.

Google mentions that you can use text files. I realize text files wouldn't provide info like how often a page changes. What I'm wondering is if it is advisable to use the text pages until I figure out XML.

Also, I'm curious if other search engines utilize sitemap files. If they do is it only XML files? Or will they index the text file as well?

The sitemap is very simple:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">

Then for each page:

<url>
<loc>http://yourdomainname/pagename</loc>
<lastmod>date of last modification</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

EG:

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/index.html</loc>
<lastmod>2005-12-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

And finally, finish the file with

</urlset>

Don't be scared thinking you have to learn XML.

Matt

Matt,

Thank you for breaking it down. The way you've presented it takes the intimidation out of doing it.

hi folks,
now that G indexes also dynamic pages with many parameters (especially with the help of GoogleSitemap), are links in dynamic url important for the link popularity of the linked site?

I have the same (?) question as wyattgillette, but let me rephrase:

We rank 13 for a keyword and a competitor ranks 2 for the same keyword. I compared our pages and we should be ahead of this competitor if it wasn't for the fact that our page (not the site) has no inbound links while his page (not his site) has a few and accordingly a bit of a page rank (again, I am not talking about his our our general page rank but just the raking of the pages in question).

Or is the rank of a subpage irrelevant?

Page Rank is ONLY relevant to the specific page, and never the "site". The text used in the anchor elements that link (as well as those page titles and surrounding content) can also be important factors.

However, that's a bit off topic -- does submitting to Google Sitemap help with indexing. I've seen reports that for some people it has.