Don’t Leave Indexing to Chance - Google Sitemaps is your Friend
May 4, 2007 | Comments (8) | Filed under: Traffic
When it comes to existence on the web, you can’t leave anything to chance. This is especially true when it comes to making sure all your content is indexed and added to all the major search engines. With billions of sites out there and millions more showing up every week, you can’t assume Google or Yahoo will get to your site eventually.
The best way to make sure every page you publish is indexed is to be proactive and tell Google whenever you add something new. if Google is in the loop, all the other search engines will follow (and in most cases beat Google to the punch). Not only that, but at the same time, why not tell them exactly the URL they need to read in order to find your new content?
The best way to do that, is to build yourself a sitemap.
Lucky for all of us, Google provides an amazing set of tools to help you do just that. Google Sitemaps is one of the many tools available to webmasters as part of the Google Webmaster Toolkit. A Google sitemap is really nothing more than a very simple XML file showing Google where all of your content is and the URL they can visit to index it.
To create your own sitemap, it really doesn’t take much programming skill. You simply follow the specification outlined on the Google Sitemap website and fill in the appropriate sections. If you are using one of the more common site packages such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or Nuke, then you won’t need to do any programming at all due to the wide variety of plugins and addons already available for each platform. For example, Bookmark Bliss uses the Google Sitemaps plugin for Wordpress.
By adding a sitemap, you ensure that all of your articles get maximum exposure to search engines. An added bonus to adding your sitemap is the huge array of additional tools that Google provides to help you analyze your content. For example, with Google Sitemaps you can view things such as which of your pages have the most external links or which keywords are most popular for bringing traffic to your site. You can even see a list of external links to your site, which is my personal favorite.
There is really a plethora of useful applications available to you through Google Webmaster Tools that can really help you to analyze your traffic and make sure your content makes it to all the major search engines. After all, without Google Webmaster Tools, I might never know that we average rank number one for the search term “fuzzy sheets” or number 6 for the term “I think I love You.“
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8 people have left comments
Being able to see the strange off the wall terms you rank for is one of my favorite features. Plus it can help give you ideas for other terms you should target with your SEO efforts.
Here’s what I cannot understand. It looks like in the Google Webmasters Tools you can see all external links to your site, it’s over 19000. But when you search on Google for link:http://www.fuzzyfuture.com/ it brings you only 84 results (actually if you go to the last page it’s only 36 links). Yahoo on the other hand for the same search brings over 1500 results. Does it mean that Google sees all incoming links but count only very few of them?
I think the discrepancies come from a lot of different factors. For starters, Google is notoriously slow for updating links, especially for new sites. With this site being only a few months old, I think our rate of getting new links (it’s not hard to have a huge increase when you originally had zero) is much faster then Google updates it’s link list. Give us another 4-5 months and I bet that list will be much longer…
Yahoo is generally much faster on the draw, but since a lot of people only deal with Google and make Yahoo an after thought, they don’t always get the benefit of Sitemaps so they might not get to your whole archive right away.
I personally think the numbers from Google Webmaster Tools are the best to view because the sitemaps are downloaded daily and it gives you a direct count of which pages are being linked and which keywords are being used to link them.
Not sure about that. One of my small blogs is over 1 year old, it has PR5.
Searching link:http://www.myblog.com/ on Google brings me 26 links (most are internal).
Google Webmasters Tool shows over 1000 incoming links.
I think 1 year should be long enough to update incoming links for Google.
When I want to see sites linking to me I use Yahoo.
Here’s a user friendlySitemap generator plugin for wordpress.
Quote from their description:
Is it just me or does anyone also noticed Google is starting to give us more direction on what we need to do to be found on the web.
I too have the problem of seeing 1261 “external links” to my site but only 5 (count ‘em FIVE) links:www.ediblenature.com links. My site has been on the web since 2000 so what explains the difference. The links shown in the sitemap tool are valid external links from pages with decient page ranks so it vexes me what is going on or how to improve my situation. Any suggestions out there?
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