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The gain for Google is that the Sitemaps service is meant to provide it with more information about available online content, with the end result of improving search results for users.

The gain for Webmasters is the potential traffic boost from having their pages referred to in Google results. With the increasing importance of search engines in determining the traffic of a website, the black art of 'search engine optimisation' can be crucial for a webmaster.

The automated procedure - currently still in Beta form, like most Google initiatives - will help re-assure site

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builders that their work has been recognised. Previously, sites had to wait to be 'crawled' periodically by the GoogleBot spider, or use an 'Add URL' page and hope Google found all the pages linked from it.

In addition to having all new content indexed faster, the service will allow webmasters to prioritise the pages they want crawled first.

Note however that submitting sitemaps will not guarantee that a site is included in Google indexes or necessarily effect how sites are ranked on the Google Search results pages.

More information can be found at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps. The process involves submitting an XML-formatted site list, which can also be used with the free open-source Sitemap Generator tool for generating an XML sitemap.

The new service does not replace the existing content-logging technologies - the GoogleBots will continue to crawl through deepest cyberspace.

Sitemap 0.84 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.