Sitemaps for AdSense publishers 101

Using AdSense to generate revenue from your site is important, but that's not why you built it -- you built it so people could take advantage of all the great content you've created. That makes it even more important that users are able to find your site. We caught up with Shaluinn Fullove, Product Marketing Manager for Google Sitemaps, to find out how Sitemaps can help.

I have a Wiki/blog/forum site and frequently add new content -- how can I help Google index my newest content?

If you're looking for better coverage in the Google crawl and fresher search results to help people find your pages, get started with Google Sitemaps. It's a free service and provides an easy way to submit URLs to the Google index and automatically keep Google updated when changes are made to your pages. In addition, Sitemaps gives you detailed reports to keep track of other search-related statistics for your site.

Also, you might want to check for tips on Google's Webmaster FAQ and guidelines.

Can I find out which search queries people are using to find my site?

Yes, Sitemaps provides an easy way to see which queries people are using to find your site and which queries lead users to click through to your site from the Google search results. Additionally, you can see the average highest position your pages rank for the associated search query.



Sitemaps also offers a report that shows you the most common words linking to your site from other websites, and the most common words found within your own site content.



I just discovered my robots.txt file was blocking Google from crawling my pages. How can I make sure this doesn't happen again?

We recently released a robots.txt analysis feature. This feature shows you when our crawlers last accessed your robots.txt file, the status returned, and whether your robots.txt file blocks access to your homepage. You can use this feature to test changes to your robots.txt file against several of the Googlebots or the Robots standard.



Posted by Suzie Dewey - AdSense Publisher Support