Google Sitemaps, Friend or Foe?

Google release for the consumption of the website owners a new protocol (a.k.a. XML-type document) that can be used to feed the spiders all the pages of a website. It doesn't guarantee all the pages will be cached immediately (or ever I suppose). And, in theory, I'm sure people will find ways to take advantage and exploit it (not that I want to give anyone any ideas). The protocol is in beta now so we’ll just have to wait and watch.

As for myself, I had just put together an HTML sitemap when Google's XML version was released. I'm going to maintain both because my HTML sitemap can help human visitors while the XML one is Google-specific. Since I use Movable Type to blog (and for content management), I'm also using that to create and maintain my sitemaps. I have several fairly static pages, which I "hard code" into the sitemap file including my main index, contact and about pages. They exist and the URLs shouldn't change. My category archive pages are also "hard coded" because I don't anticipate adding new categories. Categories are dynamically pulled and listed. While I didn't originally anticipate adding categories, I recently created a new category and briefly forgot to add it to my sitemaps. By dynamically pulling categories, updates to the sitemap should be seamless. Finally, all entries are dynamically added to the sitemap.

There is some debate around the additional attributes that can be used for each URL including frequently of updates and date last modified. For the static pages, I include the update frequently attribute. For the individual entry archives, I give them the last modified date attribute and for the category archives, I give them an updated frequency of daily. If Google follows the information provided and only pulls the pages it needs to, I save money on bandwidth – or at least I have that bandwidth available for human visitors or other spiders.

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The personal website and blog of a 20-something web designer that works in a city by day and freelances by night (without a desk - long story). Continue reading