webqem blog

On 15 November Google announced that Yahoo and MSN would join Google in supporting a common Sitemap Protocol. Information about the agreement has been placed on a new site at Sitemaps.org

Google XML sitemaps have been around since June 2005. Yahoo soon followed, allowing submission of sitemaps in various formats. Now the three search engines have come together to agree on a standard XML format for sitemaps. Google will accept sitemaps in a variety of formats, such as txt, xml and rss feeds.

In a December WebProNews interview with Vanessa Fox, Product Manager Google Webmaster Central , Vanessa spoke about Google sitemaps. Sitemaps don’t guarantee your site will be accepted and included onto the search engines. They don’t boost your ranking at a search engine. What they do is make it easier for the search engine robots to crawl pages of your site that may have otherwise been hard to find. A sitemap is of most use to new pages that have not yet been crawled or indexed. Compulsory fields are the URL and location. Optional fields include the relative priority, date of last modification, and frequency of changes to pages. The priority of a page is meant to indicate the importance of a page as compared to others on your site; not the importance as compared to external sites.

Vanessa also spoke about duplicate pages. If a site contains pages that are basically duplicates of others within your site, indexing all of those duplicate pages and returning them on a search results page would not provide a good search experience. Preferably only one of those pages should be indexed. Sitemaps are one way of indicating the page you prefer to be indexed.

webqem can generate sitemaps for new and existing sites, and for newly designed sites, can optionally update the sitemap and notify Google whenever the site changes.