SiteMaps: What’s In It For Google
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Maybe I’m too cynical, or maybe just always looking for the angle. I always like to give people/companies the benefit of the doubt but Google has officially lost that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Google hater, I just came to realize that Google does not do anything without there being an angle in it for them.
Google (and any public company) is about making money. Anything they do is designed to have a direct or indirect benefit that assists them in increasing their profit margins. For Google, data gathering is an essential component to increasing search relevancy, which increases users, which increases ad revenues. So what better way is there to gather data than by releasing free “tools”.
Take the web accelerator, for example. Billed as a great tool for users, it was really nothing more than a way for Google to gather additional stats on surfer habits and what not.
Now Google releases SiteMaps. It is essentially being described as a pay-for-inclusion program without the pay part. A way to get all your pages into Google’s index, or least a way to allow Google to be made aware of them. So what’s in this for Google? Is it to expand the reach of their index? They have 8 billion pages and counting, are there still that many sites that have “hidden” pages that the spiders can’t find? Let’s say there are. Doesn’t Google require that for any page to be ranked the spider must be able to find the page naturally via links? So what’s the SiteMap program really about?
Again, call me cynical, but I’m curious about what data is Google is looking to collect with the new SiteMap program. What does SiteMaps provide Google that their crawlers do not? I don’t have these answers, but then again, maybe a free tool, is just a free tool.
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Tags: Google, Search Engines
Posted in Search & Marketing
