pf » Tag: sitemaps on Pete Freitag's Blog

Here's another little known feature about the sitemaps protocol, you can actually ping search engines and crawlers to tell them about your sitemap, or to tell them that it has changed.

Just a quick tip for those of you that are building XML sitemaps for your web sites. You can now add a line to your robots.txt file to include a pointer to your sitemap file, it would look like this:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.

It appears that Google has expanded on the stats that they offer to webmasters. The stats were previously available only to those with a sitemap defined, but now you can access them just by telling them your url, and verifying.

They also provide more stats than they did a few months ago.

In addition to Google Site verification I also noticed today that Google sitemaps is now accepting formats other than their sitemaps protocol schmea.

Google sitemaps now accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds.

I just noticed today that you can verify that you own a web site from within the google sitemaps website. The process is simple - Google will tell you to create a file on your site (something like /GOOGLEea6f95a80579477e.html), then they check to see if its there.

PJ Hyett has discovered that his out of date google sitemap was the reason for his drop in traffic from google. So if you created a sitemap when they first came out and forgot about it, you either want to keep it updated (creating it dynamically would be a good way to go), or remove it from google.

Google has introduced an XML schema for describing your site structure, and update frequency, it's called the Google Sitemap Protocol. The protocol is offered under a creative commons license.