Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Taking Advantage of Site Mapping

Simply put, site maps are a list of the pages on your site. There are two kinds of site maps: those that humans can use to navigate a site, and encoded site maps for the use of web bots and crawlers.

Google encourages webmasters to create the second kind of site map, which is written in XML. If you have this kind of site map registered with Google, your site will likely be more fully and quickly indexed, and changes to your site will be noticed more frequently.

Sites with certain characteristics will benefit from site mapping. Here are the kinds of sites that will benefit the most from mapping (although there is no downside, so site mapping is something all sites should do):

• Sites with dynamic content

• Sites that have pages that the Googlebot can’t easily crawl and process—for example, pages featuring AJAX or Flash

• New sites with few inbound links (the Googlebot crawls the Web by following links from one page to another, so it may be hard for Google to discover your site if it isn’t well linked)

• Sites with a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other or are not linked at all

To get mileage with Google, the site map should conform to the standards set by Sitemaps.org. At the time of this writing, the current version of the standard is Sitemap Protocol version 0.9, with the specifications found at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php.

For example, here’s a sample site map containing one URL (and one page):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> ...