• by Shankar Gupta , June 6, 2005

Google Friday released an online service to allow Webmasters to automatically submit their own pages for indexing into Google's search engine, aiming to give publishers more control over how and when Google's crawlers index their site.

The utility, called Google Sitemaps, allows Web site owners to sign up and register their sites, and automatically generates an XML-formatted site map, containing a list of the URLs that the site owner wants Google to crawl, and then hosts the file on their servers and tells Google where to find it. Google then can automatically collect newly updated files, updating their search indexes accordingly.

In theory, Web publishers using Sitemaps will be able to direct Google's crawlers to pages they may be missing, and notify Google when changes are made to the site--resulting in faster updates and more pages for Google's search indexes. The aim of the service is to improve the "coverage and freshness" of the search giant's natural results, according to the company's Web page.

"We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the Web better for Web masters and users alike," Engineering Director Shiva Shivakumar stated on Google's blog.

The service might resemble paid-inclusion deals offered by other search engines, except that Google is offering the beta service for free. Google states on its Web site that submitting a sitemap does not guarantee higher placement or even inclusion.