One of the most frustrating things about Search Marketing has been getting Search Engine "Spiders" (aka Robots, Crawlers) to successfully index all of the pages on a Website.
Google now provides an easy way for us to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google.
With Google Sitemaps™ we can automatically keep Google informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl.
With Google Sitemaps™ you get:
- Better crawl coverage and fresher search results to help people find more of your web pages.
- A smarter crawl because you can tell Google when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes.
- Detailed reports to learn more about how Google directs traffic to your site and how the Googlebot sees your pages.
We strongly recommend the creation of a Google Sitemap™ as a way on ensuring all of your content is able to be discovered and indexed.
About Google Sitemaps
Search Engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.
By using Sitemaps to inform and direct Google's crawlers, we can improve the recording of your web pages in their index.
If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, we can create a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change.
A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace Google's normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program.
A Sitemap simply gives Google additional information that they may not otherwise discover. Sites are never penalised for using this service. This is a beta program, so we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to the Google index. Over time, Google expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as they refine their processes and better understand webmasters' needs.
Also, we can submit updated Sitemaps as your URLs change, but you don't have to, as the spiders will periodically revisit your site (and will use the frequency information we provide in your Sitemap as one of the factors in how often they revisit) and look for new pages.
To use the latest Google tools for your site, please Contact Us
Credit: Much of the information on this page has been supplied by Google
