Web Marketing Strategy Update

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.“ 

So, for those to lazy to go and read the FAQ here are the relevant points:

What other formats can I use for my sitemaps?

1. Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, a popular protocol in the library world. If your sitemaps are already available in OAI-PMH version 2.0 format, you are welcome to submit these.

2. RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds, using the link/lastMod fields.

3. A text file containing a simple list of URLs with one URL per line.

Anyway, I read through the rest of the page and finally stumbled across the price of this (according to the email) “absolutely brilliant” product.

$147 … Phew! That’s quite a lot of pennies, no?

And the sales letter claims it will soon to go up to $197!

At that point I closed the browser window and decided to write this. Whilst not wanting to douse someone else’s bonfire, and having nothing against anyone charging for a product that fulfills a need, at that price I thought people should know there are much cheaper options.

First and foremost, as I’ve already pointed out, it is not true that you must use XML to participate in Google Sitemaps. At a bare minimum all you need is a plain text list of all your page URL’s.

Secondly, not only do Google themselves offer free software to make your XML sitemap, they also provide you with a handy list of Third Party Programs & Websites for Sitemaps

Amongst Google’s list are the following free online XML sitemap generators:

www.sitemapspal.com/
www.googen.eu.tt/
www.autositemap.com/
www.tarrantit.com/GoogleSiteMap/
sitemap.peterz.info/home.php

In each case, basically all you do is feed in your website URL and click a button.

In addition to the above, Google also lists several scripts you can install on your website to make XML sitemaps. There are also a few CMS plugins, including Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress v2 Final And on this blog, I use Dirk Zimmermann’s great little Google Sitemaps plugin for Wordpress that automatically provides you with a site map for your WP blog in 3 formats: XML, XML.GZ, and HTML.

As previously mentioned you can also use Google’s own Sitemap Generator to automatically create Sitemaps and submit them to Google. Sitemap Generator can create your Sitemaps from a URL list, access logs, or a directory paths. You need to install the script on your own site and it requires Python version 2.2 installed on your server to run (check with your host, but it probably already is).

Lastly, it needs to be emphasized that getting your pages crawled by using Google Sitemaps does not mean they will all be immediately added to the index, nor will using sitemaps affect your ranking.