Entry 103 - Google's New Toy: Sitemaps

Google's New Toy: Sitemaps

From Googleblog - 6/2/2005 05:29:00 PM
We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It's a beta "ecosystem" that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.
... Full article —>

Damned nifty; a bit like robots.txt on steroids. All submissions seem to be tracked based on a user account, in my case a gmail handle. I spent an hour or two working up an on-the-fly generator for the wB 1.0 cms, and will, if this rain persists, probably spend tomorrow working up a mod process for the 0.xb series.

Some links about Google Sitemaps:

• Google Sitemap Submission page
• Google.com: About the Sitemap Generator
• The "Protocol" Explained
• Sitemaps for Wordpress (no gzip)(SocialPatterns.com)
• The Schema
• A bit of background on the schema, etc. (SocialPatterns.com)

I already have xmlrpc pings (technorati, ping-o-matic) integrated into HB, so I plan to throw that in as well. ◊