Last week Google unveiled their new SiteMap program which allows webmasters and site owners to feed it pages they’d like included in the search engine’s index. The program is free and inclusion isn’t guaranteed, though Google is hoping the new system will be more comprehensive than traditional crawling alone.

At first glance, this closely resembles the paid inclusion (PI) programs Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and others offered several years ago – the major difference being that it’s free. PI models of the past offered URL submissions for flat fees as well as CPC’s per URL submitted. While Google’s program (or any other PI program, for that matter) does not offer a firm guarantee that a URL will be included in the results, it does offer an alternative way for sites to be listed in the Google search results.

It seems that the main advantage in Yahoo (and the reason why they can charge per click) is that you have much more control over the message presented with your listing. Even if Google’s program still relies on meta data, titles/descriptions/keywords should be part of a site’s SEO housekeeping in the first place. Bottom line is that SiteMap is a free way to point Google to your content, which may not be reachable otherwise, so businesses should take advantage.

We see SiteMap’s functionality translating well to niche product sites, providing a much-needed boost. It could also benefit sites with high-quality content but poor link structure.

Read more in the Google SiteMap Group on (oddly enough) Google Groups.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 10:33 am and is filed under Search: Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.