Google Sitemap Improvements
Today I wanted to give you an update on Google Sitemaps.
If you didn’t know it, Google sitemaps is a way that you can tell Google about all the pages on your web site. You can even tell it about pages that are not linked to off your home page. It won’t neccessarily help your search engine rankings. You’ll still need to have other links to your page, good text with good keywords, etc. However lets say you created a brand new page or a brand new set of pages. With the Google sitemap you can let Google know about these new pages right away.
I’m not sure how much this affects search engine rankings, if it even helps at all. However I have always had a sneaky suspicion that using Google’s services at the very least helps you get indexed quickly. It may not help your overrall ranking but it will get your site indexed.
One of the cool new features of Google Sitemaps is that they offer statistics on your sites. You can see top search terms. Like my personal blog is apparently more often found by people searching for the word apendectomy than any other. Weird eh?
They now offer three types of stats:
Query Stats
The search terms people use most often to find your site.
Crawl Stats
Stats from the last time your site was crawled by Google.
Page Analysis
Shows you how Googlebot sees your site. I don’t really understand this one, because it sees my site as all text/html. I guess maybe if I put this on my Send Out Cards Infomercial site it would show the videos my site has too?
Index Sites
Very cool stuff here. You can do this stuff by hand but if you want a shortcut Google shows you which pages on your site are indexed, pages that refer to your site, the current Google cache of your site, information they have on your site, and pages that are similar to your site.
As you can see Google sitemaps has made a lot of recent improvements.
ONE word of warning.
You now need to verify you own your site. This is really easy. You just have to click on the verify link. That will tell you to create a blank html page on your site that has a specific name Google is looking for. Once you create the page, you hit the verify button and it will verify you are the owner of your site. This page is just a blank page. It does NOT need to be in your sitemap. They just want to make sure you have rights to create a web page on the web site in question.
You know, maybe tomorrow I’ll give you guys a tip on how to create sitemaps in WordPress
- Ben Fitts
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