A Simple White Hat Technique To Get Indexed By Google
By Satyajeet Hattangadi |
Everybody knows that getting indexed in Google is getting more and more
difficult each day and every body is looking for that edge over the
competition.
Most "white hat" SEO's frown upon methods like cloaking,
blog and ping and other such "black hat" techniques and never had any special
technique that they could use to help get their pages indexed
better.
Well, presenting Google Sitemaps, Googles latest offering which
is still in the beta stage, and which won't make the purists
frown.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats
Google
sitemaps is a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites'
content is going to change, which is supposed to give Google a better idea of
what pages to index.
By placing a specially formatted XML file on your
web server, you inform Google of whenever your pages change, and then the
googlebot crawls the updated pages making the necessary updates to its
database.
Google has provided the format your xml file has to be in
at
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html
An
interesting point is that the xml file has 2 tags, changefreq and priority with
which you can also indicate how important each page is, and how frequently the
page changes.
The valid values for changefreq are "always", "hourly",
"daily",
"weekly", "monthly", "yearly" and "never" and similarly
the
priority can vary from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the
lowest
priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the
highest priority page(s)
on your site.
Once you have the xml file in place on your server, you
need to inform Google about it by opening this URL in your
browser
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URL
where
the URL part in the above URL should be the URL-encoded location of your
Sitemaps xml file.
Now Google has provided an open source script that
will
automatically generate the xml file for you. The only drawback being its
in a scripting language called Python.
There are however several Free
Third Party scripts and tools available.
1)Softplus GSiteCrawler: This is
a windows software and is
extremely easy to use.It has been coded in Visual
Basic 6.0.
http://johannesmueller.com/gs/
2)SiteMaps Pal: This is
a online service that generates the
sitemap for you.It has a limit of 1000
links. So if you web site has more than 1000 links, this won't work for
you.
http://www.sitemapspal.com/
3)Google Sitemap Generator: This
is another free online sitemap creator.This service lets you crawl sites 3
levels deep and limits the number of links to
400.
http://www.my-google-sitemap.com/
4)phpSitemapNG from
enarion: This is a php script that you need to upload to the root of your web
site and the script generates the sitemap file on the server.
It also
lets you submit the sitemap to Google by clicking a link.
The drawback of
this script is that you will need to upload it to each of your sites and it also
doesn't recognize subdomains.
http://enarion.net/google/
5)Google
Sitemap Generator for Dreamweaver: This dreamweaver extension by George Petrov
lets you quickly create Google Sitemaps for your dreamweaver
sites.
http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=10538
6)Google
Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Here is a plugin for wordpress
users
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-2-final
7)SecretSpider
generator: This is a paid software priced at $97. Its advantages are that it
also lets you gzip the xml file thereby making it smaller in
size.
http://novasoft.secretspid.hop.clickbank.net/
So, go ahead
and make your website more Google-friendly.
About the Author
Satyajeet Hattangadi is the Owner of Novasoft
Inc
http://www.novasoft-inc.com/products.asp, creators of Adsense Cloaker
http://www.AdsenseCloaker.com a
unique php script that hides your adsense ads from the robots and helps prevent
de-indexing by yahoo.
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