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What
is a Google
Sitemap?
A Google
Sitemap is a map of your site generated in a
specific format prescribed by Google. Lots of
people struggle to find a tool to generate
your sitemap for you, but here is a reference
to a free tool that I use myself:
http://gsitecrawler.com This free tool will
allow you to create a Sitemap in the right
format for Google. It will also allow you to
create a list of URLs that can be used for
submitting a sitemap to Yahoo.
2. Some tips
on creating the sitemap:
- Make sure
that you are excluding pages that Google
shouldn't really index. Examples are some
images (e.g. arrows and bullets) or pages
that contain session
info.
- You should
also go through the sitemap and check any
pages that might have slipped in that are
old or not valid any more; or that are not
particularly relevant. For example, in my
Joomla sites I have a page for for
requesting a lost password - I exclude this
from the Sitemap.
- Upload
your your sitemap to your website through
FTP and place it in your root
directory.
3. How do I
tell Google about my sitemap?
You need to
create an account with Google to submit your
sitemap.
Go to
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
and use your gmail account or create a new
account specifically for managing your sitemaps
if you don't have a gmail account. Once you are
logged in you can add your website (you can
actually add multiple sites to one
account).
Adding a
website to your account doesn't mean yet that
you've added your sitemap! There are two things
that you can now do with your website. You can
add a sitemap, or you can 'Verify' your site.
Let's look at these two options and what they
mean to you.
Adding the
sitemap
If you click on
'Add your sitemap' you will be asked to select
your type of Sitemap - choose 'General Web
Sitemap'. Once you've done that you will be
asked to provide the path to your
sitemap.
Enter the path
to your sitemap in the Entry box
provided.
So what will
this do for you?
Let's say that
your website is not updated very frequently.
The chances are that Google only indexed a very
small portion of your site - a couple of pages.
This means that there are pages on your site
that Google DOES NOT EVEN KNOW ABOUT. They are
not 'indexed by Google'. So if you have a nice
article about 'cashflow problems for
entrepreneurs' on your site but it isn't
indexed, nobody will find you in Google for
these terms. Please remember though that
getting indexed by Google does not mean that
you will be on the first page - but it is
rather a prerequisite. Submitting the sitemap
means that Google will index all the pages of
your website.
Verifying your
site
This is
something else that you can do - indepently of
submitting the sitemap. Verifying your site
means that you tell Google that you are the
owner of the site. Once you have done that,
Google will make some statistics about your
site available that you will not be able to get
access to otherwise. You can verify your site
through uploading an HTML file - although this
does not work if you have redirect (e.g. a
custom 404 page) on your site.
Rather use the
Meta Tag method - just add the tag that they
provide you to your main index.html, index.php
or index.asp file.
What can you
see when you verify your site?
- Diagnostics - to see if
there are any errors with crawling your
site - maybe you have broken links, or
redirects that you shouldn't have, URLs
that time out etc. If you know about these,
you can fix them to make Google crawl your
site more effectively.
- You can
also set up your 'Preferred domain'. Some
websites are referred to with a www in
front of the site name (the familiar
www.yoursite.com), and some without the www
(like del.icio.us). You can now inform
Google which is the one prefer. This has
been a bugbear with Webmasters for a long
time now - the way that Google views your
site, since it actually sees the version
with and without the www as two different
websites.
- Statistics
- This is where things become
interesting!
-
- Query Stats: Here
you can see where you feature in
the search results. This is so
cool! You can actually see for
specific keywords where Google
ranks you. Do also choose your
search location for the different
Google engines since the results
are not the same (for google.com
and google.co.za, for example). You
can use these to monitor your
search engine rankings and use it
in conjunction with making changes
to your website in either content
or linking strategies to try and
see where you can
improve.
- Crawl Stats: This
tells you how Google have assigned
PageRank to your site. Frankly,
this is not useful to me at all.
The way that they have structured
the information is unclear. What
does 'PageRank not assigned' mean?
They don't even explain it in their
own help files. I am assuming it is
pages that they have indexed but
that they haven't assigned PageRank
to yet. But does that mean 'real'
Pagerank (in other words, their
internal PageRank?) Or does it mean
that they haven't published
PageRank yet - which is just the
external publication of PageRank
that is only updated every couple
of months?
- Page Analysis: The
interesting bits here are the words
that GoogleBot sees on your
website, as well as the words that
are used to link to your
site.
- Index stats: The
type of searches that you can do
here is pretty standard (site:
link: etc) and besides, we all know
that the link: search do not show
all the links back to your site
that Google really knows
about.
4.
Conclusion
Sitemaps give
you a way to communicate with Google about your
site. The additional info regarding how they
rank your site are nice to have. There has been
lots of communications on some forums
(specifically some forums where Google staff
also hang out) about the fact that it would be
really useful if Google would outright inform
you if there is a major problem with your site
that caused your site (or pages) to be dropped
from the index. Hopefully the Google staff take
note of further recommendations and implement
even more useful utilities that you can use to
improve your site's rankings.
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