Why You Need a Google SiteMap
Why Have a Google Site Map?
In June 2005 Google launched a new service called Google SiteMaps™.
Google SiteMaps allow website owners to quickly submit their website’s new or modified page URLs (web addresses) to Google’s web crawling spider which is called “Googlebot”. Google SiteMaps have no influence upon search engine ranking performance or the calculation of a site’s PageRank™ value; however what they will do is allow a site owner to get their site quickly indexed by Googlebot faster than ever before. This in turn ensures that all the pages within a website are quickly indexed and included into Google’s search results, thus improving search engine visibility for the site.
Normally Google’s crawler Googlebot will find each and every page on your web site through links that point to it from other websites that are already known to Google. Once Googlebot has spidered or crawled a web page, it returns every once in a while to check for your updates. This is typically every 4-6 weeks. Shortly after Googlebot’s visit, Google updates its index and changes the ranking of your pages according to the visible text content and image descriptions etc on the page, Google will deliver your pages on its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for new keywords or it will rank your pages differently. If you’ve added new pages and if you provide links to these pages, Google includes them into its index. That’s the simplistic view of the process, however to make use of Google’s SiteMap service you don’t need to understand the mechanics of all this.
Why Google SiteMaps Were Introduced
This established procedure of crawling links from one site to another has its disadvantages both for Google and the site owners as it eats up bandwidth and other resources and a high number of the results are fairly useless. Googlebot has to crawl millions of web pages daily, just find out what’s changed and what hasn’t. Since this process takes a number of weeks it’s not always the most efficient method of getting new page content into its index which in turn makes its search results the most relevant.
As such Google introduced SiteMaps as a way for website owners to tell Google when the content on their respective sites has changed. As a result both sides benefit. Google saves machine resources and bandwidth costs and the site owers get their site content listed into Google’s SERPs a lot quicker.
The fastest we’ve seen brand new site content bening listed in Google’s SERPs using the SiteMaps method is less than a day. That’s quick in anyone’s book.
Find more information about Google SiteMaps here.
If you would like us to set up a fully functioning Google SiteMap for your site like the one we have for ours, then please get in touch.
Incidently Yahoo Search™ has now also introduced the same idea and you don’t need to generate a separate site map file. You can use your existing Google SiteMap file and submit it through Yahoo’s Site Explorer feature.
Tags: google sitemaps, PageRank, Search Engine Promotion, seo, SERPS, web crawlers, xml sitemap files
