Google Launches Google Sitemaps

Ninwa writes "Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap. More information on the protocol is available in an FAQ. What's most interesting is that Google is licensing the idea under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. According to the Google Blog, this is being done '...so that other search engines can do a better job as well. Eventually we hope this will be supported natively in webservers (e.g. Apache, Lotus Notes, IIS).' They even offer an open source client in Python."

Comments

great interview

[professorhojo]

for more crunchy detail, here's a great Q&A interview i found with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps:

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050602-1952 24

Re:Cool idea

[rehannan]

I just put a new site online. About 4 or 5 days after submitting it to google, it was the number one hit when searching for the title of the site.

Re:Cool idea

[singleantler]

It's quite common to be high up for matching terms for about a week, then disappear for three months or so. This seems to be normal behaviour for new sites and is nicknamed the Google sandbox and seems to have been confirmed by the patent application recently made public.

The sandbox is just an artificial lowering, so if you're a match for a rare term you can still be found quite easily.