Its long been established in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) circles that having a decent site map can definitely help search engines spiders and bots to more accurately index your site. Now Google has taken this one step further and introduced the Beta of its Sitemaps feature.
Google say this new feature is to speed up the indexing time between site submissions and site crawling – as you may know, sites don’t get crawled straight away after being submitted to Google – and by introducing this feature, Google claim that they can speed up the process of crawling as you effectively present _all_ your links to Google in one go, rather than simply submitting one single URI (Uniform Resource Indicator). Makes sense to me.
Google have given their biggest indicator yet that they intend to make semantics play a big role in the search engine of the future by insisting that site maps submitted to them follow a rigid XML schema. This is good news for both them and us. Them as it gives them a single format to play with, us as besides also giving _us_ a single format to play with, it encourages us to think about semantic flow.
Below is an example of the XML file using the Sitemap format (0.84 at the time of writing):
As you can see, its fairly self-explanatory. Within each url element there are a number of child elements you could declare including the location (loc), the last modification date of this page (lastmod), how often the page is likely to change (changefreq) and how important this page is relative to the other pages on the site(priority). Google provide a full listing on their Help page.
If you have a small site that changes infrequently, you may wish to create your sitemap by hand but if you have a large site you should find a way to let your site auto create your Sitemap – your sitemap file acts like a robots.txt file in that it is always monitored by Google so finding an automatic way to update it as your sites pages update is a must. Google have tried to help in that respect and have produced a Sitemap generator written in Python. Or, for those of us who use WordPress, there is a dedicated plugin written by Arne Brachhold that does all the work for you. I’m also in the process of writing a fairly generic script to do this in PHP. Maybe you know of a script that does this already.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Kev: I noticed this the other day on one of the SEO feeds I’ve got (me – a geek?!) – and I’ll hopefully be incorporating it in to the current (as yet unfinished!) redesign of my own site. I think Google are on to another very good idea here, and one that will probably be seized upon by the web community ‘en masse’ over the next few weeks/months. Good post.
Indeed. I think its no coincidence that Google are in the midst of another large update to their algo and this gets launched at a similar time. I’ll be interested to see how well I do in SERP’s in a few weeks.
I’m not as sure as others, about how this will affect search results. I seems better for the smaller less known sites, that are updated frequently; however, how long until someone figures out how to use this submission to railroad their site up in the results.
I’m not sure El. I think you’re right that its a legitimate concern but I’d imagine that Google have it under observation pretty much all the time :o) First sign of anything dodgy and I think they’d slap the poor offender pretty hard.
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
Nice one fp, thanks :o)
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