Google has recently released a new, free SEO software tool called “Google Sitemap Generator.” It’s a Beta release that Google describes as “… software that improves the ability of search engines to find the content of your websites. ” I have installed it on one of our Web servers and have been working with it for a few weeks. This article is the first part of at least two articles I will be adding to the blog to provide some initial information about this product and my impressions of it.
Note that Google Sitemap Generator is software that you must install on your Web server. If you don’t have access to your Web server this article might not be of much use to you. Otherwise, read on!
What is A Sitemap?
As defined by Google, there are two kinds of sitemaps. The first kind — and most commonly known — is an HTML page placed on a Website that displays a list of all the pages on the site, usually in a hierarchical order. The second version of a Sitemap (with a capital S) is relevant specifically to Search Engine Optimization. It is an XML file that provides a list of URL’s for your site in a format that is friendly to the search engine indexing technologies.
Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google and the other search engines that use this XML format. They are particularly useful if your site has dynamic content, has pages that are not search engine friendly (like rich AJAX or Flash pages) or your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other (or not linked at all).
One final thing to keep in mind is that Google makes the point of noting that using Sitemaps supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a Sitemap to a search engine, however, you will help that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
View more details on Google’s site here.
What is the Google Sitemap Generator and How Does It Help?
To save you some time tracking this information down on Google’s site, I have extracted here some details that will answer the most obvious questions and provide some bits of information that I felt were most important.
According to Google the purpose of the tool is to analyze the way users access content. The way it works is that it monitors your web server traffic, and detect updates to your website automatically. The tool then builds Sitemap files that contain the URLs that you want search engines to find.
The Sitemap Generator creates industry-standard Web Sitemaps and automatically submits them to the search engines of your choice. The Beta version of the product submits to the following search engines:
- MSN
- Ask.com
- Yahoo
- Google (of course)
Getting Started
Your first step is to download, install and configure the Google Sitemap Generator software on your Web server.
CAUTION: Keep in mind that this is Beta software to be used at your own risk. You may want to first test it on a development server. Consider yourself warned.
WINDOWS PLATFORM
The software has been tested on the Microsoft Windows 2003 Server (32 bit or 64 bit) platform running Internet Information Service (IIS) 6.0 as well as Windows 2008 Server (32 bit or 64 bit) running IIS 7.0. You’ll need between 100MB and 1GB of free disk space; the number of unique URLs on your Website determines the actual disk space needed. Google says that one million URLs require approximately 1GB of disk space.
LINUX PLATFORM
Google Sitemap Generator has been tested with the following types of Linux systems:
- CentOS 4.6
- Fedora 7
- Debian etch r0
- Mandriva 2007
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (32 bit or 64 bit)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (32 bit or 64 bit)
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.0 (32 bit or 64 bit)
- Ubuntu 6.10 (32 bit or 64 bit)
The disk space requirements are the same as for Windows Server. Google Sitemap Generator has been tested with Apache web server versions 1.3, 2.0, and 2.2.
For more details on the installation process and to download the software follow this link to Google’s Sitemap Generator installation site.
Coming in the Next Installment
In the next article in this series on the Google Sitemap Generator I’m going to cover the following:
- Global Configuration Options
- Single Site Configurations
- My Impressions
I’m also going to post some screen shots so you can see what this thing looks like!
Remember your Google SiteMap is specific to Google.
Jeffrey,
You’re right, but note that Google Sitemap Generator includes a tool to submit the Sitemap to Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.
John
Hello,
Nice post and good recommendation. I was thinking about using something similar a few months back but was a concerned about the many files on my server that aren’t up to date or finished I would be doing a lot of filtering but it would be worth it.
http://www.marblehost.com
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