Google Begins Website Update Reporting Service
Google today unveiled Sitemaps, a program where you can notify Google of any updates to your website so that it crawls your site immediately. Essentially, its like RSS for entire websites, with webmasters creating an XML file that indicates recently changed or new pages that Google subscribes to. In true “push” fashion, the Sitemap can notify Google when it changes.
Search Engine Watch has a Q&A with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps. There is some basic reporting, and I’ll bet webmasters are chomping at the bit for more.
Now, onto the analysis. Its pretty simple: You’d be a moron not to join this program. I’m sure most webmasters who actually care about SEO will implement this quickly. For them, getting into Google quickly is super-important, and a necessary edge no site wants to leave to their competitors. Sitemaps should become part of every SEO company’s program. I hope the next update to CPanel automatically implements it for all the websites who use CPanel hosts. Its free, so the only downside is not using it.
UPDATE: The Google blog notes that Sitemaps is released under a Creative Commons license so all search engines can use it.
I don’t agree. Google already indexes an entire website in a few days, if webmaster knows a bit about SEO.
Right now, one inbound link and a good website structure are enough to get into Google database in one day for homepage, and less than a week for 100/200 pages. And Googlebot spiders entire website often (meaning almost once a day).
So what with Google Sitemaps? I think Googlebot will crawl pages only when an update is notified. Not exactly the best thing, in my opinion.
For sure i won’t try this service for now. I want to see what happens with websites that use it, and i wanna evaluate if there is some kind of benefit.
Comment by Ste | June 3, 2005
Why would you want Google to crawl your pages when they haven’t been updated? Isn’t that a waste of bandwidth? With Sitemaps, Google indexes your site faster, and then doesn’t come back until you need them to.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | June 3, 2005
Seems to be a great idea for sites that normally wait a month for the Google ‘bot to come spidering their site. Smaller and newer sites should be on this ASAP. For larger sites, especially those crawled daily by the spiders, the report that one person almost brought down their server running the open source software to create the site map should be reason enough to hold off until the program moves out of beta…unless you’re running on your own server and don’t mind downtime??
If you want to limit the daily crawls just add the line to the header that lets the spiders know when to visit each page - seems that this would serve the same purpose and work for all major search engines not just Google…and not cause any outages as you run a greedy program on your server.
Seems like a lot of work to achieve a result you already have.
Comment by Margaret Chiffriller | June 4, 2005
Well there are some ideas about this in my head.
+ Flat web sites are going to disappear soon. Take a look at where cable tv is going.
+ Google is more of a broadcaster. Going from pull to push. And go a bit farther out with this and you have something resembling television.
I read the WebProNews article this afternoon and got seriously excited about it. I just finished my own sitemap software by late evening.
My program runs on my server and fetches sites on remote servers. It doesn’t run on the same machine as the web site.
It indexes an entire site and builds a map of the web site. I perform some calculations that tell me what the priority should be, but I make the final decisions based on other information. It is important data to have when one is dealing with tens - and hundreds of thousands of urls.
Anyhow, I am quite surprised that I am only the third person to comment here today.
Take care,
Comment by Waitman Gobble | June 4, 2005
[…] ping it would create enough buzz that better tutorials would surface. Although, there has been a lot of talk (and 23rd Wor […]
Pingback by 23rd World » Google’s Sitemap Buzz | June 4, 2005
it seems good idea, for too long a time, updated content indexed by google bot. updating report is good
Comment by jacky | June 5, 2005