Google Sitemaps Review
August 17th, 2005 by Michael Gray in Google, ReviewsIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I launched multiple new websites in July (more than 2 but less than 10) and decided to give Google new Sitemap tool a try. To keep things as even as possible I put links to each of the new websites on different established website home pages, which had a PR of 4 or 5 (pagerank is broken and stupid, not dead).
The best place to learn about Google Sitemaps is directly from the Google Sitemaps Pages. Google gives away tools that run directly on the server (danger Will Robinson, danger!) and provides links to third part sitemap tools that run primarily offsite. I like the Google Sitemap Generator from Tarrant IT, it was easy to use and follow, but the others are fine too. It does have a limit of 750 pages but that’s not a problem for me. Once your website is live you have to generate a sitemap file and put it on your server. You then sign up for a Google sitemap account tell it where to go, and sit back and wait. Google picked up the file within a few hours, however it took between 4 and 8 days for the homepage to be indexed. The sites that did not use the Google sitemap had their homepages indexed in approximately the same time frame, so there was no benefit in the time to index. However each of the sites using the Google Sitemap were deep crawled and deep indexed. Yes 100% deep crawled and 100% indexed, in some cases hundreds of files. None of the sites without sitemaps experienced deep crawling or deep indexing. So if you have a site that is not getting pages listed in Google, the sitemap tool will probably help you out. One thing to be wary of is Google is probably monitoring for large increases in page counts (legitimate and auto generated), and this may trigger automated algorithmic penalties. These pages aren’t ranking for commercial, competitive, non competitive or even obscure terms at the moment. The only thing they rank for are nonsensical testing phrases like “magocracy peptide“. No that’s not the actual test phrase I used, but I do use unrelated words like “magocracy” and “peptide” that would never appear in the same document for testing purposes.
Disclaimer I do run Google adsense and adwords programs but other than that I’m not affiliated with Google. I’m also not affiliated with Tarrant IT or their sitemap program. No compensation monetary or otherwise was made for this posting. Please see my advertising policy for more details.
Categories:( seo | search.engine.optimization | google | google.sitemaps | tarrantit)
Sphere It
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:48 am
very nice one… i have created & submitted the sitemap URL with your instruction.
thanks a lot!!!
June 5th, 2007 at 4:31 am
I used the Google Sitemap Generator you suggested from Tarrant IT,thats different from other Sitemap generators because, I could find out many errors in my sites like “Duplicate links”, “Double Slash”,”No description” and some more other, the site map generator I am usually using does not have such features.
But the 500 link limitation is really a disadvantage.
Thanks for sharing a worthy information.
November 9th, 2007 at 12:16 am
You could always try A1 Sitemap Generator if you are annoyed about the 500 page limit. It also offers various analysis albeit different from what you describe.