The Chatterbox

Google Sitemaps

I should sub-title this one Paid Inclusion Without Paying, since that's basically what it amounts to. ;-)

In case you haven't run across it yet --and most haven't since it's still in Beta-- Google Sitemaps is a pretty cool new method you can use to let Google know about all of your pages so that they can spider them.

Seriously it's much like the the Paid Inclusion services at Yahoo! and other places, with two major differences.

1. Google Sitemaps doesn't cost you a dime.
2. Because of this you can submit every single URL of your site instead of having to choose just a few pages that you hope will convert well for you.

Now you're probably wondering why Google would do this, and more importantly why they would do it for free when others are charging for the same type of service. Well, it's a culture thing.

Hunh? Culture?

No, I'm not kidding. Google, pretty much since its inception has had a culture inside the company that they want to collect information about everything, becoming essentially a huge catalog of every scrap of information on the Earth. This has been their defining principle since the very beginning, and continues to be what inspires most Googlites. This is why you often hear about Google doing things like scanning entire libraries at their own expense.

Google and everybody else knows that there is a huge Undiscovered 'Net out there that they cannot spider for one reason or another. Mostly because of technical issues that their spiders cannot deal with. It is not unusual to see very popular, well respected sites that only have 50-70% of their pages indexed. In Google's eyes this small fact is a crime.

Most times this isn't a huge problem for webmasters because there will be other pages that are similar enough in concept to still pull the traffic the webmasters want to receive.

So it's not a big deal unless, like Google, your aim is to know about everything about everything. For them, missing even miniscule, perhaps inconsequential information equates to failure. If for no other reason than that they're not following through on the entire purpose of Google existing in the first place.

Yes, as a webmaster this concept is tough to wrap ones head around. Webmasters are concerned only about getting quality traffic and converting the real people behind that traffic into customers. Most search engines are concerned with driving traffic in such a way that they can make a profit from their advertisers, and to an extent Google shares this concern.

But when you get down to the base level of why Sergey and Larry first created Google, they wanted to father the foremost encyclopedia the world has ever known. They wanted to know Everything about Everything.

To do that, they need to find some way to crack the vast Undiscovered 'Net.

This is what Google Sitemap is all about. What it was designed to do.

A side benefit for we webmasters is that we now have an easy way to let Google know about every page and file on our site(s), even those which have been troublesome for Google to find and crawl.

Paid Inclusion without having to pay.

I like it!