by Brad Halcrow (22/08/06)

The Google Sitemaps service enables you to tell Google about pages on your site that may not be otherwise easily found by the Googlebot. Also, rather than waiting for the bot to visit via its regular schedule, you can tell Google as soon as a page has been updated resulting in faster indexing and therefore fresher search results. By using the Google sitemap we are also able to identify any issues a search may be having when trying to crawl your site.

"…Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs." http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html

How is it useful?

A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site, it does not however replace Google's normal methods of crawling the web. It will not directly affect your natural search results.

"…any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines."

We can determine:

• PageRank distribution
• What pages Google is having trouble crawling
• Top search queries
• Crawl errors such as unreachable URL's, timed-out URL's
• What are the most common words the Goolgebot is seeing within your site