Google Sitemaps - One month in

It’s been about a month since I uploaded my first Sitemap to Google Sitemaps. This seems like a good time to look back and see if it has made any changes and if those changes are good.

June 3 is when I first read about Sitemaps and within a few hours I had put together sitemaps for my 4 sites that I reguarly work on. Two, this one included, are Wordpress and use a downloaded script; and two are Etomite based and use a snippet that I wrote myself.

On of the sites, my photography business site, had been updated about 6 weeks prior to this but had still not been updated in the Google index. 4 days after submitting my sitemap Google deep crawled this site for the first time since the update. It also deep crawled another site of mine that I had put up around the 1st of June and was working as a control.

6 days after submitting my sitemap the site was showing up in search results. This is far faster than the 8-12 weeks that I usually experience.

That was about 25 days ago. Here’s what I’ve learned through this process.

• New pages are being added to the index within a few days instead of the 4-8 weeks that I’ve experienced in the past. Around 72 hours is what I’ve found to be typical.
• Pages get updated in 1-2 weeks.
• GoogleBot downloads a sitemap file 4 times a day. About every 12 hours GoogleBot will download the file twice with about a 5 minute gap between.
• The sitemap is downloaded by the same user agent as the normal Google spider - GoogleBot / 2.1.

Sure, there are negative responses to the sitemap process as well. But from what I’ve seen the hour I spent creating and installing scripts to build my sitemaps was time well spent.