Google's helping hand for webmasters, Google Sitemaps

Committed to its mission of offering the best search results, Google announced today the implementation of a new service, concerning especially webmasters, regardless of the fact that they manage a portal or just a single-page site.

Google Sitemaps will allow webmasters to exert a higher level of control over the pages indexed by the search engine. Practically, through this service, webmasters can point out which pages they desire to be indexed first, which are the modified pages, when did it happen and which is the frequency at which modifications are being performed.

The service is free of charge and a Google hope that by using it, the site's content will be better indexed, but does not ascertain the fact that it will also bring about an increase in a site's ranking. The service will not replace the search engine's spiders, being developed only in order to help them.

In order to use this service, webmasters must register at Google Sitemaps a XML file, which can be created by using Sitemap Generator, available on Sourceforge.

Up until now, webmasters had no choice and, in order for their site to be indexed by Google, they had to submit a form which allowed only the insertion of their Web address.

More information on Google Sitemaps are available here