Now Google wants your help

Want to improve your website coverage on Google - Read this. Google have started a new service called Google Sitemaps - a collaborative crawling system for improving the coverage and freshness of Google index. Participation is free. Inclusion isn’t guaranteed

Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If you want Google to crawl more of your web pages or want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes, this is the service for you. Using Sitemaps, Google hopes to expand the coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion of website content in their index. They however don’t guarantee that they will l crawl or index all of your URLs.

The way Google Sitemap works is pretty simple. You place a XML formatted file on your webserver which instructs Google to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed. Whenever you make changes to your website, you accordingly update your sitemap. And Google will also help you create this file using a script called Sitemap Generator - It can be configured to automatically create Sitemaps and submit them to Google. Sitemap Generator can create these Sitemaps from a URL list, access logs, or a directory path hosting static files corresponding to URLs.

There has alway been lot of speculation on When Googlebot decides to index your site and What pages Googlebot chooses to index. Looks like with GS, website owners might get some control over this. Google Sitemaps will also be a big help for SEO’s in understanding how Google reads the website layout and what layout works best. This service is however not for people who do not have access to their webserver directories. ( I fall in that category )