Excellent news for web designers…there’s just one sitemap standard to worry about for all the major search engines. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed, this bears repeating, agreed to use the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Visit sitemaps.org to learn how to create an XML file that tells spiders where to go and what has changed. If you’ve already been using Google sitemaps, it’s the same protocol.
Read more on TechCrunch.
I’ve yet to pick my poison, but here’s a few alternatives to Google’s Sitemap Generator:
iCrossing and Harris Interactive’s study of US adult search patterns offers insight into how Americans use the web. The study returns the following key findings:
Seventy-seven percent (77%) of U.S. adults who are online have been using the Internet for more than five years. Furthermore, 93% of all online adults have at least three years of Internet experience.
Over half (53%) of all U.S. adults who are online use search engines most or every time they are online, trailing only e-mail (87%) and general surfing (55%). This compares to one-quarter (25%) who visit entertainment sites, 17% who engage in e-commerce, and 21% who use instant messaging (IM) or participate in chat groups most or every time they go online.
Though I’m easily seduced by well wrought information graphics, this report seems both impartial and thorough. I was suprised by the high percentage of users with three years of experience - it makes me feel a little better about the challenge of designing for maximum usability without compromising graphic quality and interest.
via Social Patterns
Google’s Sitemap Generator is not exactly easy to use, but the potential the Sitemaps program has to reveal important content buried in complex or dynamic architectures is very promising.
After trying to install, configure and run the Google Sitemap Generator my server for a few hours I realized three things: 1. I don’t know anything about Python, 2. running shell scripts is harder than I thought it would be, and 3. Google is really expecting a lot out of your everyday web designer.
I mean, I can follow directions, I even taught myself Perl back in the day but for some reason, I’m missing something. So I added a search my RSS feed aggregator to look for blog posts related to Google’s new Sitemap service and related tool, the Sitemap Generator, which was unveiled just two days ago, hoping it would create enough buzz that better tutorials would surface. Although, there has been a lot of talk (and 23rd World was even quoted - whoopee!), no one seems to have reviewed the generator tool itself.
In fact, the only mention anyone makes of using the generator script (that I could find) were two instances of problems. Fortunately there’s already a PHP script solution for us folks running WordPress blogs and I suppose I could make one the old fashioned way until then. Okay, maybe abbreviated versions. As long as we’re handcoding, stream of conscious offers some good advice:
1) Don’t set your priority really high all the time. Google folks are not stupid. It will penalize you for making everything have a high priority. My advice is set everything at 0.5 and set a few high priority pages as .8, or 1.
2) If you run a dynamic site, then this is really for you — you can make sure that google knows about every page. Even pages that are not linked to.
Just to rephrase the priority thing, Google explicitly states that the priority is only used to compare pages within your site, so if you had them all at 0.5 it would be no different than if they were all at 1.0. It’s is simply an opportunity to create emphasis. This is really a great idea, and I would personally advise people to de-emphasize portal and about pages, placing emphasis on keyword rich pages and blog posts themselves. This program has a lot of potential. You see, Google can see hierarchy in terms of site architecture, but not everyone’s actual important/relevant content is in the top tiers (although, ideally it should be). I can’t wait to get this generator script thing worked out. Please let me know if you’ve had success with it and/or if you could lend a Unix command line novice a hand!
Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index.
Basically, Google is asking web sites to supply their spiders with an xml guide to their site. The xml file is a feed format, like an RSS feed, and is easier and faster for the Googlebot to ingest. The file also gives you another opportunity to instruct Google what to crawl and when to come back. Google will continue to crawl as usual, but is hoping that this protocol will help webmasters ensure that important and/or comprehensive links on their sites are indexed. Google offers a free sitemap generator to help in this process.
So what are you waiting for? Create a Google Sitemap, upload it, and don’t forget to submit it.