QUOTE(szupie @ Jan 28 2006, 06:48 PM)
I went to the gSiteCrawler site, and tried to see what it's for. But after reading (skimming, actually) it, I still don't know why it's created. Does the program create a sitemap page for you to upload to your site? Does it help Google Sitemap in indexing your site? Why should we download it?
Thanks for your queries. Let us first of tell you what sitemap is.
A sitemap is a file which stores links to all the webpages of your website in a hierarchical form.
Advantages of using sitemap.A sitemap helps in two ways:
It gives your visitors an easier way of finding the pages of your website.
Above all, it tells the search engine robots to crawl the webpages listed in the sitemap. It also provides the Search Engines a number of valuable information regarding your webpages like :
1. The Last modified date
i.e. When the very page was modified last time
2. The Change Frequency
i.e. The frequency at which contents of the very webpage changes
3. Priority
i.e. The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site.
The Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.
Sample SitemapA sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below.
<urlset
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84...p.xsd"> <url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
gSiteCrawler is a sitemap generator that creates the sitemap for your website as specified in the Google Sitemap Protocol. It also has different other interesting features which are particularly helpful for the webmasters.
Now comes the biggest question, i.e.,
effect of sitemap in Google ranking, and it may be noted that a sitemap has no effect so far as Google PageRank is concerned. The age-old Google PageRank mechanism is still the sole deciding factor so far as your site's indexing is concerned. A sitemap only helps the crawler to crawl different webpages in your website in a better way.
Why do we incorporate a sitemap then?So far as I have seen, opening a
Google Sitemaps Account and submitting your sitemap url therein, will give you a chance to view the statistics of your webpages, errors, dead links and so many other factors that affect your page ranking.
Above all, once added, the BOT will start crawling your site more frequently.
I've seen people reporting that their sites are being crawled five times in a week.
However, if you submit your website's url alone ( just like AddURL feature of Google) after creating the necessary
Google Sitemaps Account, you will get the same statistics for your webpages.
There are other schools of thoughts also regarding Google sitemaps . Some people have reported that it is useless as they are not getting any Page Statistics on the submitted URL.
Regarding such views, we may say that, the Google Sitemaps is only in its BETA form, and Google Team is working hard on it so that it generates desired result.
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(Actually, there are a lot of sites that do not know this. I've seen a lot of sites that don't have those additional information in their sitemap.)