Who's To Blame For Faster Indexing? Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner

An SEOMoz post charts the positive impact having a Sitemap file can have on the speed of Google and Yahoo crawling and indexing your web pages.

The report seems pretty impressive and I myself feel that Sitemaps are important to have, for more sites. In fact, I recently added a Sitemap for this site, although, I really don't think it will help much with indexing this site any faster due to us being in Google News.

That being said, the Sphinn thread around this post has some quality discussion. I want to isolate one post from "IncrediBILL" who asks the question, is the Sitemap to credit for these sites getting indexed faster or is it FeedBurner?

Google acquired FeedBurner and FeedBurner is incredibly fast at picking up new content, specifically from WordPress blogs, which is what the study was done on. That being said, the report would have not shown an increase in speed to crawl if Sitemaps did not have anything to do with it. FeedBurner was a factor before the Sitemaps files were in place and they were a factor after the Sitemaps files were in place. So the only thing that really changed with this site (outside of Google changing variables, which they do often) is the Sitemaps addition.

So who would you credit for the faster indexing? Google's Sitemap protocol or FeedBurner? I'll poll it up:

Try not to use the "other" response. Yes, I know, I know.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

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posted rustybrick in Google Optimization at January 9, 2009 8:36 AM Comments (5)

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Pretty sure its google sitemap that is responsible www.loaf.co.uk has only been online for a very short period but google had indexed the site within a week

Posted by Jon at January 9, 2009 09:14

"FeedBurner is incredibly fast at picking up new content" - Well feedburner actually doesn't pick up the any content "automatically". It just reads from the site's native feed. So its not exactly a credit of Feedburner. Any RSS feed manager would work the same way.

If I'm not mistaken only "Google Blog Search" look at feeds. Which is why whenever a post is made, Google blog search usually picks it up first (I have both Google Alerts + Google Blog Alerts set up)..And after a while Google Search indexes the page.

The best way to get your pages indexed faster to is to post 'new things' frequently for a period of time and then keep the consistency.

If you post 3 stories everyday between 8-9 AM regularly for a week, you will notice a lot of google bot activity during that period the following week. So they sort of expect that you will post something during that time. But if you break the trend then it doesn't work. I tested it and it can get new posts indexed in between 2-10 mins. Also You can set up an auto ping, so that whenever you update your blog, Google Blog Search is notified -

http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/pinging_API.html

Posted by Saad Kamal at January 9, 2009 10:20

I clicked on OTHER and it shows "0".

Posted by Michael Martinez at January 9, 2009 12:36

Michael, no idea - this is polldaddy, should work...

Posted by Barry Schwartz at January 9, 2009 12:40

If I HAVE to choose-feedburner. Although I've found of late that using the scribefire plugin to post to my blog has worked amazingly at getting my posts indexed lickety-split.

Posted by Pavlicko at January 9, 2009 14:02

Who's To Blame For Faster Indexing? Google Sitemaps or FeedBurner

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