Google Sitemaps

On the Google blog I found a new service called Google Sitemaps - I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere. Seems you can give Googlebot a helping hand if some pages are not getting indexed?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

What do you guys think? It seems strange that Google are introducing this service now and not try to improve googlebot when following links (ie. dynamic and javascript)

it does seem odd. makes you go hmmm

and their sitemap generator requires python 2.2 ????

how many of you have that installed on your server? c'mon raise your hands!!

yeah, that's what i thought.

what are these guys thinking? have they ever heard of php? that's kind of almost universal on servers. python? yeah, ok...

Wow, Shades of 1994 and aliweb's index files.



There are definite differences, but having people who can make these types of sitemaps might make it easier to index some sites.

Nice interview by Danny Sullivan on Google Sitemaps: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050602-195224

Dont forget, that often tools like this are developed by just one of the engineers in their personal programming time. This particular engineer may like or only know how to use python ;)

Just a thought.

Google doesn’t guarantee indexing all the pages in the Sitemap…

This is not odd at all. Maybe you have heard berfore about "Structured Web" where you can exhange data with other web sites through web services (I don't have any URL available). This is another step to put some structure to web sites (the first was RSS Feeds).



This isn't required. It's just an implementation example (I suppose).

I have set it up on my server and created some sitemaps. It works and seems pretty cool in how it works yet I am yet to really realise the benefit of doing it yet. It allows you to specify the frequency that you want google to search oarticular pages (don't know how accurate that is but could be good)

In stalled Python on my server it was realtively simple.

This is great news. I don't know how much benefical effect it will have on websites already heavily spidered by Googlebot, but for stores and large websites this is killer. Especially those sites with complex dynamic urls and indexing problems. However there are no ranking guarantees and I am thinking that the best way to still get into Google is by natural spidering and indexing. Inclusion feeds like this raise memories of Yahoo and their SiteMatch program. As soon as you were out of that for a while your rankings tanked, and it for the most part didn't really help you much anyway. Plus they charged for it.

Off to read more!

So let me get this straight.

Firstly i have Python 2.2.3 installed on all my servers so thats no problem.

So google is going to let me create a sitemap with their tool and submit it to them for them to crawl?

It will be in xml format so i can submit it to yahoo and msn blogs for syndication.

Instead of google finding me by links whenever it feels like coming by it will just follow a path from their server to mine.

What am i missing here?
If they are not finding me by links does that mean i dont have to link my site unless i am going for higher serp positions which i dont becuse i am bottom feeding scrape scum.

This all seems a little strange to me.

Mick it is a XML document, but it is not a RSS (or Atom) document so you can't submit it to those blog services.

It is often easier to create the XML yourself than to use the Google tool.


I guess you won't rank without links into your site, but I guess Google will use this to get the overview of what documents you currently have on your site and how much priority you give the documents relative to eachother.