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A Sitemap file lets you tell Search engines like Google about all of the pages on your web site and optionally, information about those pages, such as which are most important and how often they change. By signing up for a Google Sitemap and submitting a Sitemap file to Google, you can take control of the first part of the crawling/indexing processes that search engines do to discover your pages.
This may be particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content that you change through a Content management System like Joomla!, pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, or if your site is new and has few links to it.
Google uses the Sitemaps it receives to add your pages to our search index. A Google Sitemap can provide you with useful status and statistical information. From your Google Sitemap account, you can see if there are problems with your Sitemap or with any of the URLs listed in it.
Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell search engines information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps.
Other factors however also affect your site ranking in search engines such as how many sites link to you, if your content is unique and relevant, if search engines can crawl the pages successfully, just to name a few!
A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site. This program does not replace search engines normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program.
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It makes total sense to push new links to users quickly. We don't want to wait on the engine to deliver results - we want to get content into the engine faster. Whenever it's possible, we opt to push content rather than have it pulled. That gives us a more interactive experience with Google."
— Marshall Simmonds
Vice President Enterprise Search Marketing of The New York Times Company
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