You can ask questions or add your comments at the ‘Insights into Search for Business’ Blog.

10 Uses for Google Sitemaps

There are many ways Google Sitemaps can improve the experience of your website visitors as well as helping you fix a broken site:

1. Google Sitemaps will tell you if you have an incorrect custom 404 error page set up.
   If your custom 404 page forgets to set/reset the error code correctly Sitemaps will tell you.
2. Google Sitemaps will tell you which pages on your site have an error.
   Anything in the 400 and 500 series of HTTP codes will be reported in a table and easily downloaded into a spreadsheet.
3. Google Sitemaps will validate your robots.txt file for errors.
   There's a special section for it. You can even run through new versions of your robots.txt file to ensure all the bugs are out before you put it live.
4. Google Sitemaps will tell you all the pages blocked by your robots.txt file.
   This allows you to find pages you may have blocked by accident - something that is very easy to do!
5. Google Sitemaps will tell you incorrect links, both internal and external.
   If you see any pages listed 'not found' that you know don't really exist and never have are the result of incorrect links, either internal or external. Fix if you can or setup 301 redirects to capture the otherwise lost page rank.
6. Google Sitemaps will help your site gain traffic.
   It will tell you which keywords you are found for, and which ones are your top referrers. If you're being found but not clicked on then you need to modify your title, description or page content to try to boost click through rate. This is the only way to know which terms your site is ranked but for which you get few clicks.
7. Google Sitemaps will let you know if Google has banned or penalized your site. Lucky enough I've never seen this message, but it does exist - they even make reinclusion easy through an available form, and in addition they have stated that reinclusion requests through the form receive higher priority than other reinclusion request methods.
8. Google Sitemaps will let you tell Google whether the www. or non-www. version of your site name is the correct one.
   This should fix duplicate content issues caused by Google indexing both versions.
9. Google Sitemaps tells you the last time Googlebot crawled your site.
   Useful information if you're concerned your site is not getting indexed.
10. By submitting a sitemap file, you ensure Google has a list of the URLs on your site you want indexed.
    Isn't this the reason for sitemap's existence? Well if you've fixed all the spider indexing issues on your site then this is unnecessary.

The Google Sitemaps set of tools are indispensable for optimizing your website. They're so useful and so sucessful even Yahoo has started their own sitemaps style interface.

Google Sitemaps can be accessed at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/.

Yahoo Site Explorer (sitemaps) can be accessed at http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

About the author:

Dylan Downhill is Technical Director of Elixir Systems, search engine optimization consultants located in Scottsdale, Arizona. www.elixirsystems.com

You can comment on this article at the Elixir Systems Search Blog.

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