Google has recently launched a beta test version of a new service for Webmasters called Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps allow webmasters to provide Google with information about what pages exist on their site to help the search engine better crawl their sites and reach pages that may be normally hidden to search engines inside database searches and queries.

At initial glance, the Sitemap interface looks a little daunting to the non-savvy webmaster, it is an XML implementation where you must tell Google where to find the XML file on your server, and you place a specifically coded file on your web server that tells Google what pages exist, how often there are updated, their exact urls, and their priority related to other pages on the same site.

Google offers a sitemap generation program you can utilize if your webserver is running Python version 2.2. Although I haven't tried it yet, the program is supposed to be able to generate these Google Sitemaps from url lists, webserver directories or from access logs.

Savvy webmasters should take a serious look at Google Sitemaps. Being able to communicate directly with the Google indexing spider to point it in the right direction and to tell it how often your content changes could be real gold for sites who have had a hard time getting their pages well indexed.

Non-Savvy webmasters can still create a lite version of a Google Sitemap without using XML. According to the FAQs

http://www.example.com/catalog?item=1
http://www.example.com/catalog?item=11
...
Notes about this format: