For those of you not familiar with Google Sitemap, it's a new tool released by Google early 2006. Google Sitemap allows website owners to submit a list of all site pages, helping Google make sure every single page is indexed.
Why should you care every single page of your site is indexed?
Imagine for example a website selling T-Shirts has 20 pages. The front page of the site includes images and links to the various T-Shirts sold on the site. A certain page burried under 3 links, promotes a unique Hawaiian T-Shirt that is on sale for the month.
Depending on your site popularity (number of inbound links), Google may or may not index all 20 pages of your site. We often see cases, particularly with new sites, where Google only indexes a portion of the website.
This means that it is possible Google may decide to index 18 pages of our T-Shirt website, leaving our Hawaiian T-Shirt page outside of Google's search index.
Users searching for these products on
www.google.com will not be presented with your site as a target destination. You lose money.
Google Sitemap to the Rescue
Google Sitemap (
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps) solves this problem by letting webmasters submit all pages to ensure the Googlebot indexes every single page of your site.
Google will still be crawling your site regularly, however submitting a sitemap helps to make sure no burried pages are missed.
Is it worth submitting a sitemap?
Search engine forums are filled with discussions about Google Sitemap, with some users reporting absolutely no difference (in number of pages indexed) after submitting sitemaps, while other users are claiming the opposite.
To make sense of it all, so that we can provide better service to clients, I've decided to run a small experiment, putting Google Sitemap to the test.
I picked four client websites, in similar niches, all brand new sites with zero SEO visibility. We completed our on-site SEO optimization for al four sites. Two of the four websites were submitted to Google Sitemap.
60 Days later - Analysis of GoogleSitemap results
60 days after running our experiment, leaving all four sites untouched with absolutely no off-site SEO optimization, the results came in - All sites scored a similar PageRank (1/10) and similar Alexa traffic ratings, the two sites submitted to Google Sitemap had every single page indexed by
www.google.com, while the two other sites got only 2 out of 30 pages indexed on Google.
The conclusion?
While submitting a sitemap to Google is not going to improve your search engine ranking, it's definitely going to ensure every single page of your site is indexed. And having every single page of your site indexed by Google means more customers are going to find your products and services online.
Google is the first search engine to launch this initiative, however - Google's sitemap is an "open standard" and more search engines are expected to adopt a similar system.
To get started - point your browser to
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps , claim your site as the owner and start submitting your sitemap to Google regularly.
If you need help setting this up, contact a qualified
Internet Marketing company for assistance.
