web-ology.com

Recently Google released an Xml Sitemap specification to allow webmasters every where to expose more of their site to Google for referencing. I was pretty excited when I found out about this and I immediately signed up for the service. With this service, Google effectively gives you direct access to tell them about specific pages of your website, how frequently you update them, the last time that you updated them, and the overall priority that you rank those pages in order of importance. The following statement surprised me in their FAQ’s and so I decided to try the service out:

7. Will participating in this program change my pages’ ranking in Google search results?

No. Using Google Sitemaps will not influence your PageRank; there will be no change in how we calculate the ranking of your pages.

My www.web-ology.com (by typing site:www.web-ology.com in the Google Search box) showed as having 22 files recognized by google. Around midnight last night I sumitted my website for inclusion by using a slighly modified Wordpress plug-in to expose just my blog pages to their sitemap service. When I awoke this morning, I checked Google’s index again to find that my website now had 1120 pages stored.

I’m not sure how Google indexing more of my site could not have an effect on the overall PageRank of my website. This almost seems like a free-pass in the sense that Google has finally given webmasters the ability to get pages listed. As another experiment I submitted a site that I maintain at work that has 1450 articles stored yet we have close to 5000 news stories of local content / interest. I submitted that site earlier today and as of this post, the Google still sees the same number of pages. My guess is that the site will get completely crawled tonight and I’ll post more later.