Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.

With Google Sitemaps you get:

- Statistics about your site and information about URLs we had trouble crawling.
- Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
- Fresher search results
- A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes

Google Sitemaps

Yes, I pulled that right from Google's site and I give them all credit for the content. I thought they could provide the intro to the tool better than I can. ;-)

This is a very worthwhile tool to use with your site. You simply need an account with Google and the ability to add a page to your site for validation. Takes less than 15 minutes to set-up, and provides solid information.

I asked our CTO, Eric Overfield, to provide his first-look thoughts on the tool. He pointed out the following:

- The crawl status is important, because it points out errors that may be occuring. Giving you the chance to make adjustments.
- The errors tab is great also. It really helps you know if you have bad links on your site.

He added, "All in all I think that Google Sitemaps is a great start, but it has a long way to go. True analysis of your pages would be helpful, although they might not ever offer that as it may make it easier to spam their index. This is not a tool that I would expect webmasters to use every day as it probably won't change much, but it does provide a lot in the beginning and helps you evaluate the impact of your site modifications."

We all want to know what Google is seeing and how they evaluate our sites, and this is a great resource tool. We look forward to the expansion of the beta, and seeing what other innovations Google will come up with.

Give Google Sitemaps a try!