Google Sitemaps: Help Google find your pages
If you haven't heard, Google announced its new Google Sitemaps program, a way for webmasters (people who run blogs and/or Web sites) to notify Google of the structure of their Web site. Not just the URLs to the various pages (which the Googlebot should be able to figure out anyhow), but how often the pages get updated. The idea is that by providing this information to Google you're giving them hints as to where and how often the Googlebot should crawl your blog/site.
Google Sitemaps is causing a bit of a stir right now. Experienced webmasters are complaining that there's no reason for the Sitemaps program to exist, that the existing HTTP protocol provides the necessary facilities already to do exactly what Google wants. Which is true — at least for now, although I wonder if Google will add more features to Sitemaps that can't be handled that way — but I think Google's taking the pragmatic approach by having blogs/sites explicitly provide the information, especially for blog users where the site hosting the blogs isn't under their control so there's nothing they could do to get the site to send the right info anyhow.
I'll have to add an online update to the AdSense book describing this new feature. In the book, I tell Claude and the others that's it always a good idea to have a site map page to make the site friendlier for search engines and human visitors. This is just another variation.
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