Google updates indexing service for webmasters

Launched in the US earlier this year, the beta-test program has been extended to work in French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and UK English languages.

The service is was set up to offer webmasters with a free and collaborative crawling system. Google Sitemaps is intended to provide the search firm with more information about web content to help improve its search results.

 Before Google Sitemaps, webmasters could only publish their pages to the web and wait for Google to crawl their site for inclusion in the Google search index.

Now, webmasters can inform Google about all their existing web pages, prioritise the pages they want crawled first, and tell  Google when pages are updated so that Google can index new content faster.

 Webmasters can sign up for the program at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps. They then generate and submit an XML formatted site list. This file can be created using the Sitemap Generator, a free open source tool that generates an XML sitemap for most websites.

 Webmasters do not need a Google account to generate and submit sitemaps. However, if they do sign up they can log in to check the status of their sitemaps and view diagnostic information for their submissions.

Google said the program is intended to enhance, rather than replace, the crawl technology it currently uses to discover web content.

The firm added that using Google Sitemaps neither guarantees that a site will be included in the index nor will it have any effect on how sites are ranked on Google Search results pages.