What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google's mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!


Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?...


Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website's page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site's content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the "About Us" page, or the company's press releases.


As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.


That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.


So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:


1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website.


2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website.


What You Can Tell Google About Your Site


Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly "optimized", and many of the people who couldn't care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.


Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company's address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.


You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.


What Google Can Tell You About Your Site


Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don't even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.


That's because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn't have to be "broken" for a robot to have trouble crawling it's pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

source: ifergan