We all know how important setting up an xml sitemap and uploading to Google Webmaster tools is to managing the SEO of your site.
Well yesterday Google announced in their blog that they are launching a new sitemap generation tool.
Previously Google had recommended the Python sitemap generation tool and many other services, like G Site Crawler, offered free sitemap generation.
Google’s new sitemap generator works in a different way to other sitemap generators. Rather than crawling the site the new Google tool finds new and modified URLs from your webserver traffic, logfiles or files found on your server. Google says that this method of sitemap creation is a fast way of generating this information and will also include the ability to create XML, code base and mobile sitemaps, that will also ping Google’s blog search in the process.
The New sitemap generation tool works with a plugin to the server which works with both Apache and IIS servers
More information about setting up and using the Google Sitemap generator can be found on the new sitemap generation site. This documentation includes information about how to exclude URLs which you haven placed in your Robots file to ensure that you don’t get lots of “URL restricted by Robots.txt” errors in Google Webmaster tools.
