I just got through joining the Google Sitemaps program. This program (in beta) from Google allows a site owner to submit a structured list of all URLs for a web site. Along with the URLs, you can specify the relative importance of one page to another, how frequently a page is updated, and when that last update to the page occurred.
From an SEO perspective, joining this program has these advantages:
- Ensures that all URLs on a web site are indexed by Google. This is particularly important for sites that use many querystring parameters or those that embed a session id in the URL. Such things can prevent Google (and other search engines) from completely crawling a site.
- Allows you to tell Google which pages change frequently and therefore which ones should be given more attention. This is good for home pages and channel pages on larger sites.
- There is anecdotal evidence that within a few days of submitting a sitemap, pages that were once marked as supplemental in Google are put back in to the main index. A supplemental listing in Google means that the page has been marked as one that is not too important. This can happen to pages that don't get updated for a long time or become orphaned (no inbound links).
- Can help with getting a re-designed or re-architected site re-indexed faster than just waiting for Google to notice the changes.
- A new site need no longer wait for Google to find the site naturally. Note that a sitemap doesn't guarantee inclusion in Google's index or high rankings.
Read more about the expertise I can bring to your project as a search engine optimization specialist.
- Google Supplemental Results
- Google Toolkit
- Redirects and SEO
- SEO Checklist
- How to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalties
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