Will A Sitemap Get Google To Crawl My Site Faster?

[Dale King]

I'm often asked, "why doesn't Google crawl my site faster?"

While there can many reasons for this including server speed, in my experience, the main reason is this:

If Google doesn’t find a good number of relevant, quality links pointing to your site, it doesn’t consider your site to be very important. In other words, the more relevant, quality links your website has, the more value Google places on your site - hence, the more your site is crawled.

Here's how having a sitemap can help: When the Googlebot gets ready to crawl your site, the first thing it does is look for a sitemap. If it does not find a sitemap, it will proceed to crawl your site manually and determine for itself your site's most relevant pages. So the main advantage for having a sitemap is speed.

By speed I mean, Google will take much less time to crawl your site, crawling will occur more frequently, and the Googlebot will automatically know what pages on your site are the most relevant.

There's another reason why you should consider adding a sitemap to your website - increased PageRank. Let me explain:

In addition to external links, Google's PageRank system also takes into account internal links. The more pages your website has, the higher your PageRank. There is a caveat to all of this, however:

In order to reap the benefits of having lots of pages, it is advisable your pages contain original content and not simply be duplicates of each other. Otherwise, your website may actually be penalized and your PageRank may actually decrease.

So do you have a sitemap?

Have you realized the advantages I mentioned?

Dale King

[glenda123]

Great point Dale.

I've often used http://pages.google.com/-/about.html

If you are having trouble getting your pages indexed why not publish themon a subdomain on google? Naturally you want to point the links on pages.google.com to your internal pages.

[braver55b]