Alright, so you’ve heard of a site map and you heard that it can significantly improve your ranking on search results for Google and other major search engines earning you extra sales.But what is this new Google Sitemap and how easy is it to get a Google sitemap?

What is Google Sitemaps?

Google Sitemaps is an easy way to have a conversation with Google to keep them up to date with all of your web sites pages and images (for Google image search). Google Sitemap also lets you log in to an account and upload a new XML site map whenever you want. When you log into Google you can check the statistics of how many people searched for certain terms that your site appeared in the top 10 results and you can see if Google is having trouble finding your web pages.Â

Google Sitemaps will tell you:

  • Crawl errors : They list the URLs we had trouble crawling and why we couldn’t crawl them.
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  • Search queries that return your site in the results: They list both the top queries that returned results from your site, as well as the top queries that directed traffic to your site.
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  • What we know about your site: They list the top content of your site and the words other sites use to link to your site
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  • Indexing information: They tell you if your site is indexed, show you which pages are in the index, when Googlebot last visited your site, and if they can’t crawl your home page
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  • Information about violations of the webmaster guidelines: If they find violations in your site, they give you the opportunity to fix the problem and request reinclusions.
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  • robots.txt validation: They tell you if we have trouble parsing your They also let you test drive changes to the file before you change it on your server.

    What Is Crawling or a Spider?Search engines are very complex. They use a series of algorithms and methods for determining where your web site will appear in their results. The search engines use a type of software known as a “spider” to crawl the internet. When a “spider” finds a web site they act like a virus and follow any internal or external link on your web site and gather information about those pages. The spiders will periodically revisit your web site to check for updated or changed content.

    It is the hope of Google to expand the web sites and relevancy of search results by encouraging web masters to make use of the new sitemap submitter feature. This will almost guarantee you that all of your web pages will be indexed in Google’s results. However, Google Sitemaps is still a beta program so they can make no guarantee.
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    What is an XML Sitemap?

    By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your web server, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.
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    How Do I create An XML Google Sitemap With Ease?

    Create an XML sitemap format that can be submitted to Google to help them crawl your website better.

    http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
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    How Do I added an XML file to Google?To add a site to your account:
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    1. Add your site to your Google Sitemaps account.
    2. Verify your site ownership.How Do I Verify My Sitemap Listing?

      From the verification page, you can choose the verification method that works best for you.
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    • Add a meta tag - We will ask you to add a META tag with a unique value to your site’s home page.
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    • Upload an HTML file - We will ask you to create a file with a specific name and upload it to a specific directory.Submit Your Google XML Sitemap:

    http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34592&topic=8482


  • Matthew Peschong
    Minnesota Web Site Design



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