Google Launches Sitemaps SEO Tool
Google has taken wraps off a new tool that it calls an “… experiment that will either fail miserably or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the Web better for Webmasters and users alike will let Web publishers and marketers make sure their pages get indexed in its search engine.”
So is this spin or a daring move possibly resulting in a useful device? While I see the benefit for users on the “publisher” side (true publishers of quality, non-regurgitated media content) I’m not sure about marketers.
It’s called Google Sitemaps and is intended to improve Google’s search results by spidering Web sites more often… and more intensively. Curiously, it’s being reported that Sitemaps will also have the effect of giving Web site operators more input in terms of how frequently their pages are indexed by Google’s bots.
In short, marketers could benefit from the ability to make sure that pages with more time-sensitive offers get indexed faster and are, therefore, more likely to be included in Google’s natural search results.
Prior to Sitemaps, Web sites could only submit their index pages to Google and hope the rest of the site got indexed. Sitemaps appears to be some kind of an attempt to fill those gaps in the Google index.
