Google Sitemaps Provides Accurate Pagerank

Posted December 17th, 2006 by John

It’s about time that Google offers webmasters an accurate snapshot of their websites’ Pagerank. At SES Chicago 2006, Rand Fishkin interviewed Google sitemaps key member Vanessa Fox on Webpronews (video found here). During the interview Vanessa informs webmasters that creating a sitemap specifically for Google sitemaps will only benefit the website by helping the search crawler find web pages that may be orphaned or are too deep inside the website. Therefore, Pagerank will not increase, placement will not increase, and Google will not *like* your website any more than usual.

So why join Google sitemaps? Well, Vanessa has been kind enough to inform the SEO community that because only the webmaster has approved access to this information, then Google can *trust* the webmaster with an accurate Pagerank rating. I agree ! Webmasters must follow Google’s motto “Do no evil”! I appreciate Google providing webmaster’s with this information and hope this will lead to much more feedback from the major Search Engines to webmasters concerning their websites. Now, the next step I would love to see in this sequence, is for Google to add an accurate snapshot of the ‘link‘ operator for webmasters. This will show a webmaster all the websites linking to his or her website. Google had to technically remove or alter this feature from the live search engine because it could easily be used to manipulate Pagerank and reverse engineer your competitor’s online marketing campaigns. Thanks Rand and Vanessa and all at webpronews!