Google Sitemaps

[Halfdeck]

Google Sitemaps help Google find pages it didn't know about, but it won't necessarily get you indexed any faster.

Say you own cnn.com or whatever that publishes 100 new pages a day. Putting those URLs in Google Sitemaps and pinging Google will let it know about those pages without having them recrawl millions of pages on cnn.com looking for new content. Luckily, Google *likes* cnn.com, so those new pages will probably get indexed right away.

Now, if I just bought a domain, plopped 100 pages on it, then submitted a sitemap XML, will that help me? I don't think so. Google will know about those new urls on my domain, but since the domain is spanking new and no one links to it, Google will take its sweet time crawling the pages and may never index deeply until I get some inbound links.

So...if you own a huge site that Google spiders and indexes regularly, then you might think about usng Google Sitemaps. If your site has just a couple hundred pages and TBPR 0, you might wanna wait. My opinion.

You may still find webmaster tools stats kinda useful (tells you if Google ran into a 404, etc). To use that resource, you don't need an XML file.