Google Sitemap

Google has a new product in beta: Google Sitemap which allows you to better interact with the Google spider. From the About page:

Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content. Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index. If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change.

This could be a great way to help Google find the most important parts of your web site. The Sitemap can be as simple as a RSS feed or list of URLs. There are also some more complex protocols you can checkout. As I already have an RSS feed, let's see how that is done.

1. Get your RSS feed. Mine is at http://m0smith.freeshell.org/blog-si/atom.xml
2. Sign into Google Sitemaps with your Google Account.
3. Click "Add a Sitemap"
4. Enter the URL for your RSS feed

After telling Google where to find the RSS feed, it needs to verify that you own the feed. You do this by clicking "verify" next to the sitemap. You will be given the name of a file. You need to create a file by that name in the same location where your RSS file exists. It can be empty. Once the file is created, press "Check Status" and Google will report that your sitemap has been verified and you can check back in a feed days to see some stats. I will do so and let you know what I see.