Dear readers,
Google has announced a new beta service which helps
1. Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
2. Fresher search results
3. A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information
about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or
how frequently a page changes
It is just similar the Search Engine Submitter AddMe.com's ROR
[Resource of a Resource] file, usually created as ror.xml file at
the
root folder of any server/website to be submitted, which we already
discussed in Chapter 22
In Google Sitemap also, similar xml file to be created at our
website's root folder, named as sitemap.xml.
Google's crawlers [search engine robot software] will recognize the
sitemap.xml file and index your site in a more faster way, smarter
and better, as explained in the first 3 points.
Even though Google already may have a better idea of (index of) what
your website contains, now with this sitemap file, the webmaster
also
collaborate with the Google's crawler to index it effectively.
This doesn't improve your search engine ranking at Google, though.
What this sitemap.xml file contains?
A sample file contains as simple as this:
If you are confused about xml, then Google also accepts if you
simply create a text file and record all your site's webpage urls,
but
that is not a full use of the sitemap.
After creating such a sitemap.xml file, you need to upload it to
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ page.
You need a Gmail account for uploading your xml file. After logging
in and uploading, you can also view site statistics by the Google
crawler.
I Don't know xml, How to effectively create a sitemap for my site?
Yes, that is possible thru web based sitemap.xml file generators,
like
this beautifully simple site http://sitemap.xmlecho.org/sitemap/
This site simply creates 2 php files for your site:
client.php and sitemap.php
these files you are required to upload to the root dir of your
website
using FTP.
After upload, comeback to the http://sitemap.xmlecho.org/sitemap/
and now click a button to generate a sitemap.xml file for your site.
Now just upload this sitemap.xml file to your root dir of your
website
using FTP.
Now just inform the google sitemap from here...
http://sitemap.xmlecho.org/sitemap/
or logon to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ and
mention your site's file in the place provided.
That's it!. Now your site is also better indexed by Google crawlers.
But this creation of xml file you have to do it time and again
manually.
To avoid that, you have an AUTO update option with asp or php
scripts.
The first two scripts i mentioned, client.php and sitemap.php are
doing just that.
Add these two files in daily cron jobs at your unix/linux web
server.
That's all, every time your sites file changes, the sitemap.xml file
also
will be modified accordingly.