Google Announces Google Sitemaps

Google has announced Google Sitemaps, which is a free online service for Webmasters. The idea it that the better information Google has about a site the better and more completely they'll be able to index it. You can sign up for free at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps .

Apparently you don't have to log in with a Google account to use the service, but if you do have a Google account you can check the status of your sitemaps, view diagnostic information, etc.

After you've logged in, you'll be asked to agree to Google's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. (Is it just me or is Google making their stance against automated queries much more "front and center" these days?) Having done that, you'll be able to submit sitemaps.

For generating a site map you have a couple of options. You can use a Python script to generate an XML document that you then submit to Google. The script and instructions for using it at are at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html .

If you don't feel comfortable using and installing script, there's a discussion of how to create a sitemap file (essentially an XML file.) at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html . You can see what a sitemap looks like at http://www.google.com/sitemap.xml . Bear in mind these things can be pretty huge.

There's a FAQ for this new service at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html , but I didn't find an answer to an immediate question I had:

Say I run sites a, b, and c. They're all under their own domain names. Can I put all site maps for all the services under ONE domain name -- list maps for a, b, and c under a, for example? And say there's a site D, over which I have no control. Say they have a robots.txt file and don't want to be indexed at all. If I created a sitemap for them, would Google's bot be smart enough to check their site for a robots.txt file before beginning to index their site?

There are already some Google Sitemaps tools available. A SiteMap generator is available at http://enarion.net/google/ . There's a tool for Wordpress users to create a Google Sitemap at http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final . There's a Google Sitemap template for Movable Type here, and oh my, look at this Google Programming Contest entry from 2002...

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