Google sitemaps :)

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly

Link here https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats

Anyone used it, had much luck with it?

Just used it on a site.. It isn't that hard to do. With your forum, I'd imagine that you would have to use a sitemap index to point to gzipped sitemaps... Easy enough to code.. In fact, I wrote code creating a vBulletin sitemap (gzipped) if you want it.. You'll have to modify the url output a little to match yours. (different domain and the site I did used mod_rewrite).

Almost forgot.. Haven't seen much change (the sites been moving up.. currently #15 for it's keywords). It's hard to say if it is doing any good. But, it doesn't hurt. So, might as well do it.

Brett

This is a great tool in making, thats what i feel. I have used this for couple of my sites but not yet crawled by google yet.

Originally Posted by madpenguin2 In fact, I wrote code creating a vBulletin sitemap (gzipped) if you want it..

I would like it please!

I love google even more now.. Can't wait till they start their own google army

There is nothing special about this new google feature

Yes, it will help google in understanding which pages are to be indexed with priority and which are to be left out.

Its atleast better than robots.txt file.

One great thing its a very cool feature for dynamic sites, they can pass all their dynamic urls into sitemaps and can even set priorities to them.

Overall its a cool feature, very soon we will see other search engines imitating the same.

I have tried to use it, but it takes too much time to set it up, so I think a sitemap from google on my site is gonna have to wait

Originally Posted by dojo I have tried to use it, but it takes too much time to set it up, so I think a sitemap from google on my site is gonna have to wait

That's probably another purpose of it:

If you invest lots of time into your site, specifically for google, they will know about it and can adjust rankings accordingly.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to write an app that could help speed things along.. I'll be thinkin about this know... :-p

I looked in to using the google sitemaps, but i couldnt see how to do it properly