Archive for June, 2005
Sunday, June 26th, 2005
What is Google Sitemaps?
After my last post, it occurred to me that many people have probably not yet heard much if anything about Google Sitemaps. So here’s a brief overview:
Google Sitemaps is a new (still in beta) service offered by Google to help you help the Google web crawlers (Googlebot) find your web pages and add them to the search engine’s index.
Anyone can participate, it’s free, and basically all it involves is adding a site map to your website in one of the supported formats and updating it when you make changes to the site.
From the Google Sitemaps FAQ:
Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If either of the following are true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps:
• You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.
• You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.
In addition, you can also choose to open a Google Account (if you don’t already have one through other Google services like Gmail, Alerts, Adsense, etc.) so that you easily add new site maps, track their status, request re-crawling after changes and learn of any errors.
No Comments » - Posted in SEO / SEM, WP / Blogs / RSS by Azam
Saturday, June 25th, 2005
Free Site Map Creation For Google Sitemaps
I got an email today from a well known internet marketer telling me about the latest thing I can’t live without. Nothing unusual in that of course — being a “newsletter” subscriber and/or affiliate of numerous sites I get countless offers for the next best thing since sliced bread every day. You probably do too (tiresome isn’t it?).
What surprised me was the subject matter. This email was telling how I could “get in Google in days” using a product that “was EXACTLY what Google wanted and even endorsed 100%!”
Woah! … Pretty strong stuff.
Turns out the email is talking about Google Sitemaps and plugging some supa-dupa new software to make you a site map in XML, which the email erroneously claims is the format required by Google (it’s the “preferred” not “required” format: see the Sitemaps FAQ )
My curiosity aroused, I click on the link, go through the ClickBank redirect and end up at the headline, “How Would you like to have the KEY to Google’s Back Door?”
Skimming through the hype (based on fact of course, as all the best hype is), I come across the same disinformation, “Google is very specific about how they want the data base file to be formatted. It must be done in an xml format.“
