Tim Flight

Looks like Google is up to tricks again, now they are unveiling Google Sitemaps where you can generate an XML file with a complete Sitemap for Google to index. This ought to have developers scrambling to complete sitemaps for submission.

It also means that there will likely be a new round of plugins for CMS systems and blogs that will automatically generate the XML sitemaps. PostNuke Google Sitemap plug-in? WordPress Google Sitemap plug-in? I imagine these tools will exist within a week. I’ll wait and see what others come up with before tackling these automated tools myself. I’ve already created and submitted a sitemap for one of my simple, static sites. It is in pending mode according to the Google Sitemap interface.

Overall I think it is a pretty neat idea. To be able to tell Google how often to index certain pages based on the possibility they will change with time is really cool. It will hopefully lighten the amounts of hits to my site by Googlebot if I can say that a page will likely never be changed again. And for pages that change daily (like homepages of news sites) I can tell them to index as often as possible.

Also being able to tell Google the relative priority of a page on my site will be very cool. Often what google seems to think is important and what I think are important are entirely different. I’ve already begun to experiment with the new feature… adding entries for pages that exist but have zero links pointing at to see if Google will find and index them (it should), etc. We’ll see how this all shakes out… I think it will be positive.

Tim Flight
Google Sitemap Developer

This entry was posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2005 at 12:01 am and is filed under SEO Search Engine Optimization, Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.