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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."
This is a cool idea, because I've often wondered about being able to "talk" to search engines at a slightly higher level than robots.txt allows.
For example, a website we launched a couple months ago is primarily images. We played nice - all of the images have legitimate alt tags, and we tried to let the site degrade properly in older browsers (although you really wouldn't get much, in those instances).
But the biggest problem we had was trying to get the site spidered by Google. It would be, and it would appear in the index, but it would be listed far below sites that linked to it. I don't believe Google likes sites that are primarily images. We populated meta tags with descriptions, but they weren't included; we even tried using hidden text - legitimate, hidden text that would serve as the sites description, but not break the design - but you know how Google feels about those sorts of things. We had to walk a fine line. This'll be nicer.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Had to say it:
http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/
Anyway, a brief look at the proposed format gives very little scope for abuse - you can specify location, change frequency, last modified and a priority, and that's it. The priority is specified as only applying to urls from the same site, so what you can do with it is fairly limited. Overall, it looks written as a set of additional hints to spiders crawling the site.
And the next thing you know will be Google launching specs on web design and then content. Who will comply? well.. anybody who wishes to be indexed by Google. That is 100% of the website owners. And thus Google will control the design, content and other things... HELP... they are taking over the internet
This might be marked as troll... but think about it. Isnt it possible?
fuvoo: watch something
Because when you launch a new site, or new section of your site, you create the site map and notify Google, rather than hoping some day they'll follow a link somewhere and come spider your site.
Google immediately knows that the site exists, immediately knows how many pages there are, how often they are supposed to change, AND what priority I place on them, so out of my 150 pages, the 10 I want spidered first are labeled as higher priority.
This makes total sense to me.
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On february 16th i sent google the following email to suggestions@google.com: Hi,
This is a suggestion for the people who take care of indexing web sites.
Because Google is the first search engine of choice it has enough of influence to point noses into the same direction.
So, i propose a new element to be added to websites: a sitemap file. Similar to the favicon file, every site could have an (xml?) file containing information about the info and the info-topography on the site.
Google has already a 'similar pages' link added to search result. What about adding a link 'show context'. If clicked upon a page is shown that provides info on where the search result is located on the site: the context of the information.
The sitemap file could also be used by in Googles core indexing-process: providing extra context to evaluate the validity of the indexed page.
Some other related advantages: google could release a sitemap/browser plugin for users. For example: open a site and if the website contains the special sitemap file, a browserplugin is activated allowing the user to browse the website using there prefered navigational tool. (instead of, or together with, any normal website menu's).
I hope to here from you
Kind regards,
mynamehere
The Netherlands
They even used the term 'sitemaps'.
Silly me! Just found in their FAQ: you can use RSS/atom as your sitemap format!