Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

On Friday, Google announced a new experiement they call Google Sitemaps. Essentially, it's an xml datafeed that you provide for Google to know about every page of your site that you want indexed by Google. It sounds similar to a Froogle feed or even Yahoo's paid inclusion program. I can't help but wonder if it's Google's way of tyring to undercut that revenue stream from Yahoo by offering the same service for free. Google has designed this to be a new protocol that they're hoping will be adopted by all webservers and search engines. To use the new service from Google, you need to have an account with Google and you can submit sitemaps.

I think it's a great idea, and it will be interesting to see how this little experiment plays out. I'm sure there are those out there who will try to abuse this system like they do everything else, but if Google has good checks in place to catch cheaters, they can simply deactivate their accounts and/or remove the offending site maps. It could potentially be very good for webmasters who will get more of their web pages indexed, and of course Google, who will increase the size of its searchable index.

More about it from an interview by Danny Sullivan