So, I’m giving Google Sitemaps a shot. I have some new blogs which may or may not be sandboxed, or just may not be fully indexed. So, I decided to try a Google product to get that indexing rolling along.

Google Sitemaps is Google’s way of jumpstarting the indexing process. Instead of just coming across your website or blog through some other link, this gives them direct information of when to go. For Google, this means more content. For publishers - perhaps faster indexing, shorter sandbox. Who knows.

Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as “spiders” to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.

Adding blogs to Google Sitemap is the easiest method of all, since blogs can be easily discovered by following links and have dynamic content. So, all you need to do (basically) is sign into Sitemaps with your Google ID, add all the blog files (xml, rtf, feed) to the list, then wait for Google to visit. It took a day or so for them to visit all 10 of my blogs, but now they are all in there.

According to the Sitemaps page that was created for me (kind of like an account management page), I’ve been indexed by Google on all blogs (old and new) for about 4 hours. For the older blogs, this is not really important. Google crawls the site a lot since I update a lot. For the newer sites, it’s good. I’ve been crawled, but the frequency is low. Now, I can manually force a crawl from the Sitemap page. Not bad.

Will it create any difference in the frequency of crawl? In full indexing? In being sandboxed? It’s too early to tell. But, when I know, I’ll let you know.

One thing to note - there was an error in Google having a look at my Drupal-based site. It’s the one site where we don’t produce the code (Drupal does) so it’s going to be a pain to find out where the stumbling block was. Stumbling blocks are not good because they can result in only partial indexing.

So, give it a shot. Let me know. Anyone have any more tangible results than these?

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