Google Introduces Sitemaps
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Are you tired of waiting for the search engine spiders to visit and index your website? Do you have a lot of content that is updated frequently? Google has developed an answer. With Google Sitemaps, you can tell the search engine when to visit your site, and what pages have been updated. While there are no guarantees with this beta, it might make life a lot easier for webmasters and site owners.
Up until now, if you wanted your website to show up in the search engines, you submitted your home page URL to the engine’s crawler, and then waited for the friendly neighborhood search engine spider to come by and index your site. Sometimes the wait could take months. In some cases, you had the option of paying to get your site indexed; most search engines have moved away from paid inclusion programs, though Yahoo! still offers one. However you slice it, though, it is a frustrating process, particularly for those with little patience.
It is even more frustrating for those with very dynamic websites. If you have content that changes on an almost-daily basis, and the search engine spiders only visit your website once a week, you’re seeing some missed opportunities. Active bloggers face this problem with their sites, but so do firms with websites that focus on news, enthusiast sites that feature fresh content daily, and other commercial sites. It’s good to have lots of fresh content, but how do you make sure that search engines get wind of all of it as quickly as possible?
Not surprisingly, Google set itself to work on this very problem. As early as May 6, Shiva Shivakumar, Google’s engineering director, reported a possible solution in a blog that he wrote on Google’s website. In early June, the solution itself became more widely available. It’s called Google Sitemaps, and Shivakumar expects that it “will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike.” Though this free service is still in beta, it has already received some positive reviews from bloggers, who are either thinking about using it or already using it –- and it isn’t just for bloggers, either.
Google describes Google Sitemaps as “an experiment in web crawling.” It is a way for those with frequently-updated websites to inform Google as to when and how often they want the search engine to index their content. It is meant to supplement, not replace, the usual indexing of websites that Google already does on its own. Google hopes that it will help it succeed in its never-ending battle to index all publicly available information.
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