What are Google Sitemaps?

Google first introduced Sitemaps in 2005 as a way for web developers and website owners to inform Google about the structure of their web sites by providing a machine-readable list of all relevant pages within a website. Since its inception, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and others have joined in their support of Sitemaps, making it an invaluable search engine optimization tool for website owners.

A Google Sitemap is a separate file within your website. In that file is a list of each of your pages, along with additional information such as how frequently the page is updated, the last date the page’s content was changed, and the importance of that page in relation to the overall website. This information provides search engine crawlers with your website layout and all of the information they need to quickly index your website and add its content to their index.

A sitemap is no guarantee of search engine inclusion or rankings. It is merely a tool to assist search engines in their job, as well as a mechanism to ensure that all of your pages are properly recorded. Sitemaps do not influence rankings, but by ensuring that all of your content is available and properly recorded by the search engines, you are helping the search engines do a better job of crawling your website.