Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps


Google Webmaster Tools feature the interface to upload a sitemap feed with the actual URLs that your web site currently is publicly serving . The list may be as large as 50.000 entries, and you may upload more than one sitemap feed to cover different areas, different levels of the web site. The sitemap is often used to map the entire list of pages, match them up with the URLs already indexed by Google, and send out Googlebot to check the ones that it may have been missed thus far. Note that validating a website in Google Webmaster Tools has countless other benefits, such as having direct access to link, relevance and crawl data on your website, even if no sitemap is uploaded.

Known issues


Note that Googlebot missing a page on your web site is most likely a navigational error, that have kept it from crawling the URL(s) in question. Thus even if these resources are to be included in the index, chances that they will not have proper links pointing to them are high. Pages that have such accessibility issues will most likely lack certain parameters, such as PageRank, and may end up as a supplemental result when doing queries they are relevant to.

+ Resolution: If you perceive such pages to be more important or relevant than others on your web site, you may need to re-examine your internal navigation in order to reflect this. Read more about Supplemental Results and Website Navigation.