Frequently Asked Questions - FAQ

We've put together a series of the most common questions and comments that come through our inbox and done our best to answer them as thoroughly as we can right here. If you still have a question, please feel free to drop us a line.

Do You Need A SiteMap For Your Website

Without a XML generated sitemap, Google visits your home page and then crawls through each page by querying every link on your website...it is a relatively slow and tedious process.... However, by featuring a Google Sitemap file, Google has your entire website’s information right at its fingertips in a matter of nanoseconds!!

While submitting your Sitemap to search engines (such as Google and Yahoo!) is not necessary, it does enable you to get more information about your web site from search engine webmaster tools such as the Google Webmaster tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Robots usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

The Google Sitemap file protocol is so extremely efficient that it has also been embraced by Yahoo, as well. It is the first time in a very long time that the two main competitors in the world of search engines have joined their efforts and are using the same protocol to facilitate their indexing procedures.

This is why we include a Google Sitemap file and a Yahoo Sitemap file as well when we build your web site!

A Word Of Caution

Your sitemaps need to be updated with Google and Yahoo. When you alter your site by adding content etc., you should immediately re-submit your new xml sitemap. You can do this by generating an xml site map at Sitemap Generator or here... XML Sitemaps

If you don't wish to do this yourself, we charge $25 to build or update your sitemap for submission to Google and Yahoo. This is included in your new web site design or re-design.