Watching Google watching You!

Google Sitemaps are developing into a useful 2-way communication tool for webmasters.

Go to:  (PPC advertisers already have a Google account)

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Google themselves say the Sitemap facility gives:

This is a significant step by Google towards better mutual understanding with webmasters. They have been reluctant in the past to have direct dialogue for fear that the webmasters will try to 'spam' the results in their own direction. 

From this data you can identify potential problem areas where the Googlebot has failed to index a page.  Just as important, is that you can see some of the information registered in the index and where it is coming from.  This means you can see where you may have unknowingly caused it to register misleading information and take steps to rectify  it.

There is no suggestion that the sitemap facility will improve your rankings.  However the removal of errors and misunderstandings must help the overall position.

There is another specific check that I recommend to all webmasters.  This is information provided in the Sitemap section but also visible outside.  Are your pages indexed?  But are they in the primary index?  If you check site:yourdomain.co.uk you will get a list of indexed pages but some may show up as 'supplemental' instead of 'cache'.  These pages are indexed in the sense that Google knows about them but are thought of as of lesser value and are most unlikely to lead to a listing in any search result.  The normal reason is that the page concerned lacks significant text.

Rather than trying to improve the content of those URLs, it is probably better to create a new page with a new URL.  'Expert' opinion is that it is very hard to persuade Googlebot to upgrade a page that has once been labelled 'supplementary'.

Talk to you next month,

Stephen Orr