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

Cool idea

[aftk2]

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.