There are generally two ways to inform Google about a new page on a website: wait for Google to crawl you and find the page on its own or let them know by submitting a Sitemap. Sitemaps are explained in detail at sitemaps.org, but it's a way of letting the search engines know about all the pages on your site that you'd like to have indexed. Here's an example site map from Wahanda.
We've been debating the usefulness of Sitemaps for some time. Are they actually used by the search engines at all? Do they have any effect on the time taken to index and crawl a page?
Well with the Valentine's Day page, I tried to answer the second question. I published the page to the website, but made sure that no other page linked to it. I then added the URI to one of our Sitemaps and let Google know (through webmaster tools) that the Sitemap had been changed.
Google downloaded the sitemap in less than ten minutes and the page was available in the index less than two hours later.
Now this isn't a very scientific experiment, but we can see from our logs that Google treats Sitemaps very seriously. An updated Sitemap is almost immediately downloaded and every URI in the Sitemap crawled.
As always, the way Google works is a mystery, but having used Sitemaps for about nine months, we've come up with a set of techniques that seem to work for us:
- Be honest with the 'priority' element. This is a scale from 0.1 to 1.0 which lets the search engine know the relative importance of pages within your site.
- Only include URIs for pages that have real value and that you'd be happy for a new customer to land on (i.e. don't include every sub-page of every set of search results)
- Don't update the Sitemaps more than once every two days.
- Write an application to generate your Sitemaps programatically. They will get out of date very quickly otherwise.
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