The Google Search Engine re indexes website content on periodic basis once every 40 - 60 days. This process is not always consistent and can sometimes become a hindrance to having new content appear in the results. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct the Google spider, we can expand the coverage of any website and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to the Google index.

Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages.

Google Sitemaps themselves are an "ongoing experiment in web crawling" and provide an avenue to circumvent spider crawling and focus on clean and relevant content indexing. This method of indexing also allows a clearer understanding of the structure of your website without having to apply Google algorithms to determine site architecture. By the same token, elements of the website that are not valuable to the user seeking information can be removed from the index.

If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URL's are available on your site and about how often they change.

A sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace our normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program.

Also, you can submit updated sitemaps as your URL's change, but you don't have to, as the spiders will periodically revisit your site (and will use the frequency information you provide in your sitemap as one of the factors in how often they revisit) and look for new pages.

Other Google Sitemap Resources:

• Please review the Google Sitemaps website