In an effort to help spiders get your whole site, Google has taken the idea behind robots.txt files and applied it to site maps. Sitemaps won’t help you get a better ranking, but it will ensure that your entire site content is included in their index. The beta Sitemaps is an XML formatted file that the Googlebot can fetch and then use as a map to the rest of your site. The webmaster login is here, but it looks like they are getting allot of attention or are under active development as half the time it returns error messages. Learn more by reading “about sitemaps or read the FAQ. Spiders are fairly simple programs and can often miss parts of your site, this new beta gives you the opportunity to ensure that Google sees all your work. Technically sitemaps worked already, we’ve long used a simple page of links to the whole site to tell Google where to look, but this is an effort to formalize/standardize the process and that can only be a good thing.
