[Web4lib] Re: [XML4Lib] google sitemaps

[Jeff Godin]

On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:

>
> Apparently these sitemaps are XML files that Google can read to create
> more accurate crawls of a website.

More accurate and more focused -- you can give certain URLs higher
priority than others, and you can notify Google when content has changed,
and specify exactly what content has changed.

> They seem to be an alternative or supplement to OAI.

Almost the reverse seems to be true... it seems that Google can act as an
OAI-PMH client, consuming OAI-PMH 2.0 records instead of requiring
Google's XML Sitemap Format files. I have not tested this, but Google
mentions it in one of their Sitemap FAQs:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html#s8

Also mentioned in the FAQ -- you can re-use your existing RSS 2.0 or Atom
0.3 feeds in place of Google's format.

Google's XML Sitemap format has the advantage of being purpose-designed
for use with Google Sitemaps. It will be interesting to see if any of the
other large crawlers take up the format / feature.

-jeff

-- 
Jeff Godin
Network Specialist
Traverse Area District Library / Traverse Community Network
jeff at tcnet.org