Google Sitemap Resources
Google recently implemented a program called Sitemaps that lets any site developer publish a map of their site and submit it to Google for indexing. It's designed to let companies guide Google's crawlers and should help get pages indexed more quickly and thoroughly. While Google says that this won't raise your page ranking, it may mean that your site gets more traffic, simply because your pages are more thoroughly indexed.
Because of the influence of search engines, especially Google, on site traffic, many tools and resources have been developed to make it easier to create and work with Sitemaps.
Tools for Sitemaps
Google provides a script that is designed to help site owners create Sitemaps, Sitemap Generator. It's a free Python script, downloadable via Sourceforge (see Resources). Many third-party tools have also emerged to support the creation of Sitemaps, also, including standalone scripts and updates to content management systems.
Content Management Systems
Several content management systems have added Sitemap support. Niall Kennedy has published a Movable Type template that will create a Sitemap. It basically "selects all" within the content database and then outputs a list of URLs with fixed Sitemap priorities. This approach should be easy to implement with any content management system.
Drupal has a free Google Sitemap module that maintains a short change history for nodes in order to better approximate the change frequency. It calculates the relative priority of each node based on node type, number of comments, and promotion. It can optionally submit your sitemap to Google whenever it is changed and can log when your sitemap is downloaded by Google.
The Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress is a plugin for the popular content management system. It comes as a WordPress plugin, so it can be easily activated or deactivated, and has a Web-based interface within WordPress that lets you set priorities, change frequencies, etc. It creates a sitemap for WordPress posts, static pages, categories and archive pages. It can also set priorities for pages based on the number of comments. The Sitemap is rebuilt each time a page is updated or added.
The open source Plone CMS has an option, Google Sitemaps 0.3, that is designed to let Plone-based websites support Sitemaps.
Plugins are also available for OS Commerce, vBulletin, phpBB, ClickCartPro, PHP ECommerce Templates and many other systems.
Standalone Applications
Dreamweaver users can use the Google Sitemap Generator command to create Sitemaps. It integrates a link crawler that generates the sitemap.xml file. It sets priority automatically, based on the number of links to each page.
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