Tell Google about Your Site Updates and Get Listed Quickly

In an attempt to index more content, more quickly, Google has begun letting Web-site operators point the search engine's crawler at Web pages and tell it when content is updated.

Google Inc. started the beta program, called Google Sitemaps, late Thursday in a move that officials said would help supplement its Web crawling technology in order to better index dynamic content and frequently refreshed pages.

Quoted from eWeek - Google to Webmasters: Tell Us What You've Got

Yes, don’t get surprised that you can now hint the Google’s crawler about your new site, as well as content updates and changes. Hopefully, this new service will benefit the webmasters and site owners, by giving Google a clear mapping of how your website is structured.

Submission Approaches

At its core, Google Sitemaps is an XML protocol by which Webmasters can submit a list of their URLs and provide data to Google about the relative importance of sites and how often they are updated, said Shiva Shivakumar, Google's director of engineering.

Click here for configuration of XML Sitemap Protocol.

Alternatively, Google also has released a Python-based Sitemaps Generator which allows site operators to generate an XML-based sitemap.

Click here for configuration of Python-based Sitemaps Generator.

Google Account

In order to use this service, the user must first create a Google Account. If you have already signed up for Gmail, you can use the same login.

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap in XML format, quoted from Google’s Sitemap Protocol Guide.



Note: Your sitemap must use UTP-8 encoding.

No Guarantee of Visit is applied

Well, according to Google, while it plans to crawl submitted URLs, it is making no promises that it will spider and index every site.

By the way, drop a visit at a post titled "Google's Sitemap Buzz", composed by 23rd World, for further information and advices.