April 30, 2006

Google Sitemaps Generates More Free Traffic

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.

That is most certainly true, as I have experienced myself by submitting sitemaps for several websites. It brings in extra free traffic. But there's more behind the idea.

I think, by making use of Google Sitemaps, Google can better value the structure of your website and from there it may be easier for them to value the incoming links to your site.

Besides that, Google Sitemaps will bring some relieve to the heavy duty Google spider (Googlebot) system. Their spiders are send out to discover new pages that they report (so they can be indexed) and visit frequently to see if something has changed there. Most of the time that's a useless task, since the majority of the pages have not changed. It only eats resources and bandwidth.
That immense task is covered by Google Sitemaps now and it's YOU who initiates this process.

Two big plusses for Google.

Whatever Google's real reason for starting this service (it's still in Beta, which means: test phase), it works like charm, if .....

.. you really submit quality content. Believe me, Google will check that. When this service started, many webmasters and website owners were afraid to use it. Some were afraid Google would discover malpractices. They will!
You submit your sitemap to their servers and they have a system in place to check if you're spamming them or are using duplicates or irrelevant content.

So, before you submit your sitemap to Google, check its content to see if you contribute to Google's goals: delivering high quality content to their customers (which is also YOU!), right?

Delete URL's to cgi scripts, duplicate pages, URL's with errors, dead links, password protected pages and irrelevant information. Also there are more and more rumors going around on the Net about bad writing style and spelling errors being penalized. Again, only rumors and not been proven, but I more and more tend to believe they are true because it adds to the quality of the content, so use your spell checker for every page that you submit and write consistent.

If you deliver a quality product, my experiences show that it improves the search engine visibility of your websites to a great degree. With Google Sitemaps your websites are indexed deep and that means ... Free Traffic!

And that's a big plus for website owners and webmasters. Whenever you change the content of your site, you can initiate the index process for Google by just submitting a new sitemap.

Another big plus is that you can see some statistics for your submitted websites in your account. It perfectly ties in with another new Google service called Google Analytics, but that's another story.

So, how does Google Sitemaps work?
It's very easy, although it may look impressive at first sight. Here's what you'll have to do.

1. Login to your Google account at Google Sitemaps. If you do not have one yet, you can open one there. (You can use this Google account for other services too, like Gmail, Google's huge email service. If you haven't Gmail yet, send me an email at case.stevens @ gmail.com -delete the spaces around the @- and I'll see if I have another invite.)
   
   
2. In your account, put the URL of the site you want to submit in 'add a site' and click OK.
   
   
3. Now Google will come back with the the URL listed. Then you must first verify it's YOU who submitted this site. The verification process is simple. They'll ask you to upload a blank text file to your root-directory and they'll specify the name for it.
   
   All you have to do is open a simple text processor like Notepad, type one space and save it as a .txt file using the name Google gave you after submitting your URL. Then upload that file to your root directory (where your home page resides) and click the 'verify'-link in your Google account. They will then check if they can find that file.
   
   
4. Now you can upload your XML Sitemap to the domain listed.