Web Marketing Strategy Update

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.

The preferred Google Sitemap Format is XML

“The XML Sitemap Format allows you to provide a list of URLs and include additional information about those URLs in your Sitemap. This additional information includes the date the content at that URL last changed, how often that content can be expected to change and how important that URL is relative to other URLs on your site.”

But don’t panic if you know nothing about XML.

Although Google has provided full details on the Sitemap Protocol for the techies, there’s also plenty of help for the rest of us. See my previous post, [Free Site Map Creation For Google Sitemaps->] for some of the options and alternative formats available, or head over to Google’s Sitemaps Third Party Programs & Websites page
 
To wrap up, also note that regarding the Sitemap Protocol Google state:
“Using this protocol does not guarantee that your Web pages will be included in search indexes. In addition, using this protocol may not influence the way your pages are ranked by a search engine.”

And on participation in the service:
“Using Google Sitemaps will not influence your PageRank; there will be no change in how we calculate the ranking of your pages.”

That being said, if you are having trouble getting Google to crawl your pages and aren’t doing anything Google frowns upon, you are likely to benefit by taking part.