Google Releases Sitemaps Beta

Google announced today the start of Google Sitemaps, a program for more effecient spidering of websites.

From their about page:
Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

There is some python code available for a sitemap generator, but python and xml are generally the type of things that make a marketing person’s eyes glaze over and roll back in their heads. Michael Nguyen has written a nice easy chunk of code for wordpress or moveable type blog google sitemap generation. I’m sure we’ll see more code like this pop up on the web as this functionality gains popularity.

The sitemaps program will be very useful for sites with index-ability issues from dynamic variables or sessions ID’s. Google says they have no plans to create a pay-for-inclusion (PFI) program similar to Yahoo Submit Express at this time.