Google Sitemaps
By the time the Web is growing,
search engines take more time crawling websites and algorithms
must be improved to spider efficiently.
Sitemaps are ususally coded in pure HTML (CSS...), webmasters
commonly use a page to describe the structure of their website
and they insert this mapping onto their main page or on a
different page, so search engines like Google find each link
with more ease.
This article overviews the Google sitemaps xml program which is
in a BETA state. The use of this XML file is to help search
engines crawl the web more efficiently.
For instance this file includes a hierarchy within the links.
As scanning of webpages becomes more sophisticated for search
engines; for instance spiders are trying to discourage keywords
stuffing and other attempts to boost back links and page rank,
new programs must be created to extract relevant websites from
the mess.
Yet in a BETA state, Google launched its program for this
purpose.
Will other webcrawlers implement this program soon ?, I guess
MSN, Altavista... are already thinking about it, a hierarchy
within the links is not a bad idea and the use of this file
should decrease the time consumed from spidering all these
useless links.
The sitemaps file
There are several formats you can use to build your sitemaps
file, you can use RSS, txt... However Google recommends the use
of its own protocol (I'm curious about what other search engines
will do about this !).
I guess we better follow Google and start building our maps
right away.
Here is the example from LinksTraffic:
And the full linkstraffic sitemaps xml file: Sitemaps.xml
For important sites, it's advised to use a Sitemaps generator,
Google provides one for free and there are some other free tools
also.
Once you uploaded your file into your server, you can submit
your sitemaps to Google (you need a Google account to achieve
this procedure, by the way you will be able to keep in touch
with the latest changes from their side).
There are some statistics about Google crawling of your
sitemaps, however keep in mind that it may take a while before
the first crawl.
Thanks for reading, i hope this article has been useful for some
of you, in a next article i will talk about the robots.txt file.