Google Sitemaps
On Social Patterns you have a detailed article on Google Sitemap Protocol and a plugin for Word Press
What is Google Sitemap?
Google Sitemap is an account based service that allows you to monitor and submit all your sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.
Why using it?
- Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages
- Fresher search results
- A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes
Edit:
Semiologic has a valid point on how this feature will be use by spammers:
With the new Google Sitemaps feature, you can now serve your spam pages to Google directly, and give them a low priority on top of that to lower their chances of ending up higher than your preferred landing pages. Sweet, isn’t it?
Yeah…very sweet indeed
“With the new Google Sitemaps feature, you can now serve your spam pages to Google directly, and give them a low priority on top of that to lower their chances of ending up higher than your preferred landing pages. Sweet, isn’t it?”
This will not work. First, Google’s spam filters apply to sitemap submissions too. Second, submitting spam in a machine readable format is just plain silly, because it reveals way too much. Some webmasters have got their sites wiped out for this reason: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=133&page=55. Third, the priority attribute stands for crawling priority, it has nothing to do with ranking.
Sebastian