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More About Google Sitemaps

  • January 27th, 2007

A Google sitemap is a specially prepared xml file that gives Google information about every page on your web site (except those you maybe don’t want it to know about–such as a shopping cart checkout page, for example). This xml file gives the URL of each page, the date and time that it was last updated, how frequently it gets updated and how important the page is relative to other pages on the site (note that Google treats this last bit of information as nothing more than a suggestion).

I recommend that even if your site is small, you do not create this sitemap file manually, unless you’re particularly trying to impress yourself (or someone else) with your skills at writing xml files. I use (and highly recommend as the best option I’ve found) a program called GSiteCrawler. It does almost all the work for you. All you have to do is download and install the program (it’s free!) and then enter some basic information about your site and let it do it’s thing. It will crawl your web site and assemble a list of all your pages. You can then go through and assign the importance of each page if you wish (or leave it them all at the default importance level of 0.5). You then tell it to create the sitemap. All you do then is upload it to your server and then log into your Google Sitemaps account and tell Google about your sitemap. You do this by simply clicking the “Add Sitemap” next to your site name on the main page and following the instructions (which amounts to telling it what kind of sitemap it is and the filename and url of the file).

If you have a WordPress blog (like this one you’re reading) things are even easier for you. All you have to do is download and install the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin, set a few parameters, and then every time you post to your blog, the plugin generates a new sitemap, uploads it to your server, and pings Google to tell it there has been an update. What could be easier?

What could be easier, of course, is to let me take care of all this for you! :)

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