Gordon's WebLog

UPDATE. SEE ALSO THIS POSTING AND THIS POSTING.

The first thing you as web master must decide is if creating a sitemap worth is worth the effort? Once you know all the benefits of a Google™ Sitemap you can create one yourself or look for a tool that does it for you.

Google™ spiders your site and stores pages it thinks are important in it's (huge) database. With a sitemap you can list all pages YOU think are relevant and even prioritize them. Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages. With Google sitemaps you get - Statistics about your site and information about URLs we had trouble crawling - Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages - Fresher search results - A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes. Besides that, you get some very nice statistics when you have submitted your sitemap to Google™. (From Google Sitemaps)

Generating a sitemap is a bit complicated, so many sites offer tools to do it. I have tried out several of them, with varying results. One site which offers a FREE sitemap generator (for up to 5,000 pages) is FreeSitemapGenerator.com and I have found it very good indeed.

How does it work?

First you must create a (FREE) account and add your first website. Just enter the homepage url of your website. Whenever you want to generate a sitemap press the make sitemap button on the control panel page. The site spiders will, just like a Search Engine spider, crawl your website finding all links. When it is done spidering your website you will receive an email You can then download the sitemap (zip file) from this site and upload it to your own website. Don't forget to submit your sitemap to Google. You can even let the site upload the new sitemap directly to your website automatically, and even ping Google™ to let them know you have a new sitemap ready. NOTE. To ping Google manually enter the following into your browser. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=www.SITENAME/sitemap.xml

On the site you have a full control panel where various tasks can be performed, and you can view a report of any link errors. You can also view a graph of how many pages have been spidered by Google.

All in all it's a very good system, one which I can fully recommend - and it's FREE !