Google Sitemaps Part 1 – What and Why
Posted by Shane Quigley on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 in Digital Marketing, SEO
One of the major issues faced by search engine optimisers is how to get the information within a website (its pages) into the indexes of the major search engines. Often websites are built in a way that requires users to dig deep into the site via many links to get to the important pages or dynamics menus are used for navigation. Neither of these will help a search engine to find the important content in a site or give it the credit it is due.
To overcome this problem the concept of a sitemap was created. A sitemap is simply a page (or tree of pages for larger sites) that contains links directly to all the other pages in the site. The sitemap is then linked to from every page in the site meaning that from anywhere in the site, you are only really 2 clicks away from any other page. As long as text links are used in the sitemap and to link to the sitemap a search engine robot now has a way of accessing all the pages in the site and hopefully will index it appropriately.
In June 2005, Google announced a new service called Google Sitemaps. This program allows a webmaster to submit an index of URLs which they want to have included in Googles web search. This allows webmasters to have a bit more control when it comes to how
their websites are indexed, allows Google to index sites more appropriately as webmasters can add data such as importance and change frequency to their sitemap files and also most recently provides webmasters who have verified ownership of a particular website with some useful statistics and insights into how Google sees their site.
Before implementing a Google sitemap it is important to realise two things. Firstly a Google sitemap isn’t guaranteed to get all of your pages indexed in Google. It can however help get more of your site indexed and facilitate better crawling. Also Google clearly states that the presence of a Google sitemap will have no bearing on a sites ranking within the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This is true although better crawling and indexing is a good start on the long road to better rankings.
So better crawling, the potential of better indexing and the new statistics available for sites that have been verified mean there are definitely good reasons to invest some time in a Google sitemap. Also through our use of and research into Google sitemaps we have discovered that MSN seems to be reading Google sitemap files and putting them to use which is another positive.
In my next post I will go through the basics of creating a simple Google sitemap file, verification and submission. In part 3, I will give an overview of the Google sitemaps interface and the useful data provided through it. In part 4, I will answer some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Google sitemaps.
If you can’t wait till then here is a link to the official Google sitemaps pages and the new Google sitemaps blog.
