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Google Sitemaps: A
New Opportunity
Internet Marketing
Newsletter Q2, 2006
By Alli Denning
Google has released its
beta version of a new program called Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps
(GS) is a tool that allows site owners to upload a sitemaps file (a
file with a complete list of the pages of a web site) that Google will
use to ensure that your site is crawled in its entirety. For web sites
that have had trouble getting Google’s attention, this may be a great
opportunity.
This is how Google
describes the program on its web site:
“Google Sitemaps is an
experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our
crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the
discovery and addition of pages to our index.”
In addition to a deeper
crawl/index of your site, GS provides valuable information that can
alert you to problems with your site that may be blocking your search
engine success. The statistics information that is available with GS
includes:
- Crawl errors
- Search queries
that return your site in the results
- What Google knows
about your site
- Indexing
information
- Information about
violations of the webmaster guidelines
- robots.txt
validation
This is a new and unique
opportunity to get concrete information about your site that can
translate directly into better visibility across all the major search
engines, not just Google. And, best of all, participation in this new
program is free.
Click to learn more
about Google Sitemaps.
If you are interested in
using this program with your web site, please
contact us. We are happy to assist you in taking advantage of this
opportunity. |