For those who are not familiar with Google Sitemaps, I will start with a brief description of what the feature is about. Search engines gather information from web sites by using special programs called spiders to navigate around the internet automatically. Such programs read web site content and this information is added to search engine databases. On the basis of the content and a few other external factors such as Link Popularity, the search engine assigns rankings to the web site for keywords or phrases. Google Sitemaps is a service that allows web site managers to submit a list of web site URLs to Google to provide assistance to the engine when it is spidering and indexing the content of the web site.

It's not mandatory to sign up for this service in order to get your web site listed, because Google still crawls the web using its spiders and will probably locate the content of your site. However, the Google Sitemaps program does provide Google with additional information about your web site, and might be helpful in getting more of your content indexed.

After signing up for the Sitemaps program and submitting a site map, Google allows you to view the following statistics about the web site:

• Sitemap details and errors
  
• Indexing information about your site
  
• Query stats about your site
  
• Crawl stats about your site
  
• Page analysis of your site
  
• URLs from your site we were unable to crawl, and why we couldn't crawl them
  
• robots.txt analysis
  

A couple of new features have been introduced recently, as described in Google's Sitemaps blog. First, Google provides you with a list of common words that are found with your site, and in external links to your site. This list can give you valuable insight into the way Google has indexed your web site content. If the list does not match up well with what you might expect, then you should try to determine the reason(s) that your site content is not being indexed properly. Some possible explanations include:

• the Google spider has not crawled all pages on your site
  
• your web site content has changed since Google last visited it
  
• the Google spider was not able to crawl pages on your site due to a server error
  
• Your web site is new, and has not yet been crawled by Google
  

A second new feature is the introduction of a robots.txt analysis. As explained in a recent Marketposition.com article, the robots.txt file on a web server provides guidance to search engine spiders and lets them know what file(s) and folder(s) they may or may not visit. The new feature in Google Sitemaps provides you with the Google spider's view of that file, including such information as the date the spider last visited, and whether it was blocked from accessing your home page. You will also be notified if any syntax errors are detected in the file.

The Google Sitemaps program is clearly evolving over time, and some great new features have been added. Although the program is completely optional, I would recommend signing up and sending Google a sitemap. It's easy to do and can possibly help improve your rankings on Google by making it easier for Google to access your web site content.

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