WebProNews

Googlites with web sites get to try out a new tool from the Mountain View home of Google Labs; the tool is called Sitemaps.

The focus of Google's Sitemaps tool will be to improve a site's coverage in Google's index.

Google lists features of the Sitemaps program to be better crawl coverage of a site's pages, fresher search results, and the inclusion of specific change information for pages on a site.

The Mountain View-based company denotes Sitemaps as a collaborative crawling system. Site owners will be able to communicate directly with Google when their site is updated, in order to trigger a new crawl and reindexing.

Site owners will have to login to a Google account and generate a Sitemap file using the free Sitemap generator, and place that file on the site where Google's crawlers can find it. Updating the Sitemap tells Google to recrawl the site again with regards to the updated pages.

"We don't want to wait on the engine to deliver results - we want to get content into the engine faster. Whenever it's possible, we opt to push content rather than have it pulled. That gives us a more interactive experience with Google," said Marshall Simonds, Executive VP of Enterprise Search Marketing with the New York Times.

One important factor that site owners should note is that Sitemaps will not boost a site's rank within Google's search listings.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.