Yesterday Google launched Google Sitemaps which they describe as follows:
‘Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.
With Google Sitemaps you get:
- Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
- Fresher search results
- A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes’
You can read a little more about it at the Google Blog.
Looks interesting. Once again I’m running out of time to check it out but would be interested in the opinions and experiences of others. Are you going to give it a go?
About Darren Rowse
My name is Darren Rowse and I’m a full time Blogger making a living from blogs like 
I’ve already given it ago. I think I had my first sitmap created and loaded within two hours which only proves I had nothing better to do at the time. :) Anyway I’m experimenting with it right now. I launched a new website with no inbound links anywhere. I submitted a sitemap for the website and I’m not going to add any inbound links to it.
I’m going to compare this with another website I launched on the same day, however that site will have inbound links and the usual promotion. Both sites have about the same number of pages. Therefore I should be able to tell if one gets indexed faster than the other, if it really does pay attention to the update frequency and priority fields in the sitemap, etc.
I’ve added a very early initial assessment of Google Sitemaps to my blog.
Six Apart posted a sitemaps.xml Movable Type template, which is at http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/06/google_sitemaps.html
Took me about five minutes to create the files for my two sites and submit them to google…
Is there a simple way to add Google Sitemaps to Blogger Blogs?
Jim – yes there is. See http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/2005/08/your-blog-and-google-sitemaps-summary.html
Here’s a nice Sitemaps plugin for WordPress:
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final