Google Sitemap

Everything you need to know about Google Sitemaps

In June 2005, Google® has launched a service called Google® SiteMaps to optimize Googlebot's web site crawling. It allows webmasters to submit new/modified URLs to Google's spider Googlebot. Google SiteMap submissions have no impact on rankings on Google's SERPs nor will they influence PageRank™ calculations, but most probably they will help webmasters to get their new stuff crawled by Googlebot faster than before. Although we can't predict how or how much this new service, which is still in BETA state, will help site owners, we tell you how to make use of Google SiteMaps. [Update July 2005: It works like a charm. It even works better than expected. It improves search engine visibility to a great degree, as long as webmasters care what they submit to Google.]

http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=133
http://www.sitemaps.org/