By Lee Sykes
October 2005
This is a 23 minute mp3 interview with software designer John Mueller who has created GSiteCrawler
GSiteCrawler is freeware software which automates the creation of Google sitemaps. It has a lot of essential functions for anyone who has a DotNetNuke website, which I highly recommend.
Google Sitemaps:
Allow the webmaster to help Google index their websites more effectively. According to Google it will not affect the Search-Rankings, but at the very least it will allow Google to figure out which URLs on your website are worth checking out more often and which ones stay static for longer periods of time.
This is essential for anyone who is using a DotNetNuke website. On one of my clients' websites that had been running for 9 months very few pages were indexed in this time. In fact most of the pages that were indexed were the Terms, Privacy, Login and Registration pages, which is absolutely useless. However once I created a sitemap and I was able to tell Google which pages to visit, all of the pages were indexed in a matter of days.
Throughout the interview John talks us through the important steps for creating a Google sitemap, as well as the pitfalls to avoid. There’s nothing worse than missing information when it comes to something as vital as Google sitemaps and John helps us to cover all of the essential details:
- What is a sitemap
- How sitemaps benefit your website
- How to create a sitemap
- How GsiteCrawler helps you to create a sitemap
- Essential checks to make with your sitemap
- Further checks you can make to your DotNetNuke website
- How to inform Google that you have created a sitemap
- Keeping the sitemap updated
Website links mentioned in the interview
Interview Extract
You can download the first 3 minutes as an example here:
Google Sitemaps (3.5MB)
(Right click on the link and select ‘save target as’ to download it to your computer)