Google Sitemap!
Cost: $199. (Available for free with
Bronze,
Silver,
Gold, and
Platinum Plans)
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap informs search engines that
individual pages on your site are new or updated and are available for crawling.
The sitemap protocol consists of an XML file that includes your Web site URLs
and three other optional pieces of information for each page:
-
How often the URL is updated.
-
The last time the URL was updated.
-
A priority of the URL relative to the
other pages on the site.
Sitemaps help ensure all new and
difficult-to-find pages are indexed quickly and completely, and are particularly
useful for Web sites that are difficult for search engines to crawl and index
effectively. Your Web site benefits from applying a sitemap if it:
A New Standard: Search Engine Giants Adopt the XML Protocol
In 2005, the search engine Google launched the Sitemap 0.84 Protocol, which
would be using the XML format.
A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the URLs and the data
under each section. Previously, the sitemaps were primarily geared for the users
of the website. However, Google's XML format was designed for the search
engines, allowing them to find the data faster and more efficiently.
Google's new sitemap protocol was developed in response to the increasing size
and complexity of websites. Business websites often contained hundreds of
products in their catalogues; while the popularity of blogging led to webmasters
updating their material at least once a day, not to mention popular
community-building tools like forums and message boards. As websites got bigger
and bigger, it was difficult for search engines to keep track of all this
material, sometimes "skipping" information as it crawled through these rapidly
changing pages.
Through the XML protocol, search engines could track the URLs more efficiently,
optimizing their search by placing all the information in one page. XML also
summarizes how frequently a particular website is updated, and records the last
time any changes were made.
XML sitemaps were not, as some people thought, a tool for search engine
optimization. It does not affect ranking, but it does allow search engines to
make more accurate rankings and searches. It does this by providing the data
that a search engine needs, and putting it one place-quite handy, given that
there are millions of websites to plough through.
To encourage other search engines to adopt the XML protocol, Google published it
under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. Its efforts paid
off. Recently, Google happily announced that Yahoo and Microsoft had agreed to
"officially support" the XML protocol which has now been updated to the Sitemap
0.9 protocol and jointly sponsored www.sitemaps.org, a site setup to explain the
protocol. This is good news for website owners, and an applaudable sign of
cooperation between known competitors.
The shared recognition of the XML protocol means that website developers no
longer need to create different types of sitemaps for the different search
engines. They can create one file for submission, and then update it when they
have made changes on the site. This simplifies the whole process of fine-tuning
and expanding a website.
Through this move, the XML format will soon become a standard feature of all
website creation and development. Webmasters themselves have begun to see the
benefits that this file provides. Search engines rank a page according to the
relevance of its content to particular key words-but until the XML format, there
were instances when that content was not properly picked up. It was often
frustrating for webmasters to realize that their efforts to build a website were
left unseen. Blogs, additional pages, or even the addition of multimedia files
took hours to create. Through the XML file, those hours will not be wasted, and
will be seen by the three leading search engines-Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
In a recent move Ask.com has now begun to support xml sitemaps and in an update
to the sitemaps protocol it is now possible to tell all search engines the
location of your xml sitemap by placing an entry into your robots.txt file.
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