What is a Google Sitemap?
A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages on your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a small peek inside the mind of Google, and can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!
Why should you use Google sitemaps?
Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website page could be removed from the index and the webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, the content of a site could be scanned, but due to algorithm quirks, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page or company press releases.
As webmasters, we were at the mercy of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through changes in search engine ranking. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website, either to understand what was wrong or to tell Google when something had been updated.
That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really came into its own in February 2006 when Google updated it with a couple of new tools.
So what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program and how can you use it to improve the ranking of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:
1. Sitemaps give you a way to give Google valuable information about your website
2. You can use Sitemaps to find out what Google thinks about your website
What you can tell Google about your site
Believe it or not, Google is concerned with making sure webmasters have a way to communicate important information about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and ranking web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not “optimized” correctly, and many of the people who don’t mind spending their time on link campaigns create some of the best content.
So Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. With this system, you can tell Google that your home page is 1.0, each of your product sections is 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is 0.5. Pages like your business address and contact information may only get a 0.2 rating.
You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date each page was last modified. For example, your home page may be updated every day, while a particular product page may only be updated annually.
What Google can tell you about your site
Having the ability to tell Google all of this information is important, but you don’t even need to create a sitemap file to enjoy some of the benefits of having a Google Sitemaps account.
This is because even without a Sitemap file, you can still get information about any errors that Googlebot found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn’t have to be “broken” for a bot to have trouble crawling your pages. Google Sitemaps will inform you about the pages it couldn’t crawl and the links it couldn’t follow. So you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages are removed from the index.
You can also learn about the types of searches people use to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give you this information anyway, but if the tool you use doesn’t have this feature, it’s always nice to get it for free from Google.
But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the page analytics section that was added in February 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on the content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found with a link to your site.
Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a result, the backlink column is wasted in part with words like “http”, “www”, and “com”, terms that apply equally to all links. websites (hey Google, how about we remove those terms from the report?). With that said, this list gives you a way to judge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts.
When you compare these two lists, you can understand what Google thinks your website is about. If the words in the Site Content column aren’t really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website copy to focus more on your core competition.
If, on the other hand, your inbound links don’t contain any keywords you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.
Above all, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your incoming linked words to match the words in your site content. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.
Additional benefits of the Sitemaps program
Google has even started notifying webmasters who participate in Sitemaps if they are violating any of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site is suddenly delisted from Google and you don’t know why.
Only participating Sitemaps can obtain this information and it is only provided at the discretion of Google. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating useless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of landing pages that redirect to other websites. Google doesn’t want to give sp@ammers any clues on how to improve their techniques.
How do you start using Google Site Maps?
The first thing you need to do is get a Google account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or AdWords account, you’re all set. Otherwise, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page (https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount).
Creating your sitemap file is fairly easy to do if you’re familiar with XML, and if you’re not, you can always use a third-party tool, such as those listed on the Google website (http://code. google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Google also has a “Sitemap Generator” that you can download and install on your server, but unless you’re pretty handy at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick with third-party tools.
In any case, once you’ve created your Google account and Sitemap file, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:
1. Sign in to your account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview)
2. Type your website URL in the “Add Site” box and click “OK”
3. Click the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding and add its sitemap file to your account.
Google Sitemaps: an excellent SEO tool
Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what’s important, what’s new, and what changes frequently. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how search engines (especially Google) view your website.
With this information, you can drastically improve your website’s ranking and quickly fix any problems Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to measure the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so that you can better focus your time and energy on the activities that bring you the most success.