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Google today unveiled Sitemaps, a program where you can notify Google of any updates to your website so that it crawls your site immediately. Essentially, its like RSS for entire websites, with webmasters creating an XML file that indicates recently changed or new pages that Google subscribes to.

In true "push" fashion, the Sitemap can notify Google when it changes.

Search Engine Watch has a Q&A with Shiva Shivakumar, engineering director and the technical lead for Google Sitemaps. There is some basic reporting, and I'll bet webmasters are chomping at the bit for more.

Now, onto the analysis. Its pretty simple: You'd be a moron not to join this program. I'm sure most webmasters who actually care about SEO will implement this quickly. For them, getting into Google quickly is super-important, and a necessary edge no site wants to leave to their competitors. Sitemaps should become part of every SEO company's program. I hope the next update to CPanel automatically implements it for all the websites who use CPanel hosts. Its free, so the only downside is not using it.

UPDATE: The Google blog notes that Sitemaps is released under a Creative Commons license so all search engines can use it.

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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