QuoteGoogle Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.
All you need to do is sign in (if you have a GMail account you can use that for a login) and submit a sitemap XML document. Apparently this will increase your ranking and help Google better index your site.
Check it out here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/
Nifty. How is a sitemap.xml supposed to look?
There is a sitemap protocol, here is a sample:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/catalog?item=73&desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/catalog?item=74&desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>0.3</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/catalog?item=83&desc=vacation_usa</loc>
<lastmod>2004-11-23</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>You can check out the sitemap protocol here (may require login):
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/...itemapXMLFormat
Skimmed the protocol. Seems like a lot of work. Likely will be a nice friendly GUI wrapper out on SourceForge within a week and linked from Slashdot, until then, meh. (It's a Friday, I'm a bit more cynical/lazy than usual ;))
Google already provides a builder tool to generate this file on the site.
written in python. ewwww!