Google sitemaps service

Posted: August 12th, 2005 | Author: Michael R. Murphy | Filed under: SEO | No Comments »

I’m looking for some feedback here. Not too long ago Google announced a BETA of their sitemap program. The idea being that you can submit an XML feed of your sitemap directly to Google as a way to improve the indexing of your site. This feed lists all the URIs on your site and has optional information such as frequency of modification to those files,you can assign higher priorities to the most important pages in your site,etc. According to their website,Google claims this should result in better indexing of all a submitted domain’s pages,fresher crawls,and a “smarter” crawl because now Google knows when pages were last updated and how often they change.

I know this is in BETA but what I want to know is,has anybody participating in this noticed any difference in their search engine results? I’ve participated in this program now for a few months with some of my employer’s domains and this personal site. Although I see from my control panel at Google that they are downloading my sitemap files every few hours,I don’t see from my logs that this has resulted in more frequent visits by Google regardless of how often my feed says my pages are modified. What I do see is the same results in the same positions as before. While Google specifically states in their FAQs regarding the program that participation will not change PageRank or the way a page’s results are calculated,again I still don’t see pages not previously indexed but included in my sitemap appearing in Google’s index or a greater frequency of visits by Google despite regular updates to my site.

Is anybody else experiencing the same thing? What do people think about this?

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