How to Make Use of Google SiteMaps
Personally, I have not set up a Google SiteMap on any of my sites yet, well, because of all kinds of distractions like moving and current satisfactory indexing by Google search engine. For those of you who are interested in Google’s SiteMaps program (not that I’m not), Smart IT Consulting has put together a nice tutorial/information service on SiteMaps called How to Make Use of Google SiteMaps.
I like this simple explanation of the program – “Dealing with billions of pages on the net, Google had no chance to communicate with webmasters on an individual or per site base. Google SiteMaps now opens this cannel for everybody, offering a method to exchange information on new and modified content in a timely manner. Both sides can benefit: Google saves a whole of a lot of machine time and bandwidth costs, site owners get their new content earlier on Google’s SERPs and reduce their server load by Googlebot no longer spidering archived content too frequently”
By the way, Yahoo is also coming out with a SiteMaps-esque service which will let larger sites tell Yahoo Slurp where their pages lie. It’s apparently not live yet, but worth including in your third quarter search marketing plans. On the Yahoo Submit Your Site page : “You can also provide the location of a text file containing a list of URLs, one URL per line, say urllist.txt. We also recognize compressed versions of the file, say urllist.gz.”
