What The Hell Is Google Sitemaps?
Google Sitemaps is useful and free tool provided by Google itself. When the Googlebot crawls your site, it might not find all your pages for the first time. With Google Sitemaps, you can let the Googlebot know where to look on your site, so all your pages will be crawled the fastest time possible.
A sitemap is a page containing links to each and every page of your site. Just take a look at my sitemap here. A decent content site should have a sitemap, since it also makes navigation and searching easier if one of your visitors is looking for a particular page.
In my experience, Google will index all your pages within 10-15 days if you use Google Sitemaps. (Of course it might vary by site and it could easily take a little less or longer) Without Google Sitemaps it could take much longer, and there is no guarantee that the Googlebot will find all your pages. With Google Sitemaps you can also give a “value of importance” to each of your pages. (It goes from 0 to 1 where 1 is the most important) The most important pages will be crawled more often.
Note: Posting your sitemap alone won’t get you listed in Google, unless you have links pointing to you from other sites. So be sure to use Google Sitemaps along with the techniques I outline in my other post, “How to get listed in Google within the shortest possible time“.
Google Sitemaps won’t only help you get your page crawled faster, but it also provides some invaluable tools, including detailed crawl and search statistics.
To learn how to create your sitemap, refer to Google’s guide on the topic.
You can post your sitemap here. (you’ll need a free Google account)
Here is the entire Google Sitemaps documentation.
There is a free online service here, which will automatically create a sitemap from your pages.
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