Will a Google Sitemap Help You Get Indexed Faster?
I am a relative newbie to website creation. Many webmasters
(from beginners to experienced ones) continually scratch their
head wondering "how can I get Google to index my new content?"
Google has a program where you can automatically create an xml
sitemap for your website. The sitemap contains a list of all
your urls with the modification time and the change frequency
for each url. After you have created your sitemap, you need to
submit the sitemap to Google (using your Google sitemap
account). After this, your need to ping (resubmit) Google every
time your website changes. The idea here is that you are helping
Google by letting them know you have new content on your site.
The url list in the sitemap ensures that Google will not miss
any of your urls while crawling your site.
Well there is the theory, how about REALITY?
The reality is that CREATING A SITEMAP AND PINGING GOOGLE
WILL NOT GET GOOGLE TO COME TO COME AND INDEX YOUR SITE.
What will happen? Several hours after your submit your sitemap
to Google, Google will download your sitemap. Good so far. Then
days will go by and Google will never come and index any of the
urls in your sitemap. Boy that really stinks especially when
considering it took me some time to figure out actually how to
create a sitemap. Google does not make it real easy for you to
create a sitemap. Google has a free script that you install on
your web server that will automatically create and update your
sitemap for you. The problem is that the script requires Python
2.2 to be installed on your web server. This seemed stupid to me
since Python is not standard on the majority of web hosts (why
not have the script written in PHP or PERL)? Anyway I found a
free third party PHP sitemap generator at
http://enarion.net/google/phpsitemapng/ that worked great.
In conclusion, having a sitemap that tells Google you have new
content will not get Google to come to index your site. I guess
the only way to get Google to index your site is to have
incoming link from popular sites that Google can crawl along.
Incidentally lack of regular crawling also makes the Google
Adsense Search not work properly for searching your own site. I
put a Google Search box on my site. However, because Google has
not indexed my site yet, user searches of my site generate no
results! This appears to be a problem for anyone who generates
new content faster than Google indexes it. The user experience
suffers due to this as I can not think of any reason a user
would not what to find the most recent information on your site.
In all fairness I should say a sitemap and Google Adsense search
may be valuable for popular, well established websites that get
indexed frequently. However, if you are relatively new to the
online game, spend your effort on other aspects of your
site!