Google Sitemaps
When you create a new product or a new page on your website, usually you have to link your existing pages to the new website and hope that the Google bots will pick up the new page the next time they index your site. In some cases, the bots will not pick up a new page for a long period of time. In fact, at Sewell, we have a page that we created over three months ago that is still not indexed. This is rare (most of our new product pages are indexed within three days), but it is not unheard of and it can drive you crazy when it happens.
Google released Sitemaps about a month ago (Google Sitemaps) to help solve this problem. Basically, you can generate a small file and leave it on your webserver which specifies which pages you would like indexed, the last time the pages were updated and your priority in indexing the pages. When you create a new webpage, the file is updated and the spider will know on its next crawl to grab that page.
This sounds like a good deal for both the marketer (who can ensure quicker and more accurate indexing of new pages) and Google (the bot doesn’t have to crawl each page and determine if anything has changed). Note that Sitemaps is designed to help you get each page indexed, but will not affect Page Rank (PR) at all. PR is determined by a complicated, evolving algorithm that is proprietary (secret) to Google. While there are some obvious things that you can do to improve your Page Rank (relevant inbound links, keyword frequency, rich content, etc.), the best thing that you can do to improve your Page Rank is write really good, informative pages that people are likely to link to. Also, if you can identify a few influential people in your industry and convince them to link to your page, you will undoubtedly improve your Page Rank.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos