You’ve just uploaded tons of useful content to your site but Google, or more specifically Googlebot ain’t coming. Worse, a site:www.domain.com check reveals that not one of your pages is in Google’s index. If they’re not in the index, there’s no way your pages, no matter how organically optimized, will appear on search engine result pages (SERPs).

To address this, Google now has the Google Sitemaps service (BETA). The service allows webmasters to submit new/modified URLs to Googlebot’s crawl-list. When you think of the billions of updated pages Googlebot has to crawl daily, using a service such as Google Sitemaps seems like a lifesaver. By telling Google which pages are updated, webmasters can get their fresh content on Google’s index faster and save bandwidth from unnecessary Googlebot spidering of archived content. Google in turn saves processing power and bandwidth because it now knows exactly what and where to crawl.

On paper, it does look like Google Sitemaps is a nice submission alternative for most websites. But as with most free services, there appears to be a catch.

A few weeks after Google’s launch of Sitemaps, more and more webmasters complain about their sites disappearing from Google’s index shortly after a sitemap submission.

When using the service, extra care must be taken by webmasters to avoid tripping any spam filters. Rule of thumb is to know what gets submitted to Google. If you submit spammy pages (intentional or not intentional), you’re basically giving Google a big, flashing “Here’s My Spam Page” sign and risk getting banned from the index completely.

For those of you who are interested in experimenting with Google Sitemaps, Sebastian of Smart IT Consulting recently published the definitive Google Sitemaps how-to guide.

As for me, I still prefer the old, tried-and-tested submission technique: put a link to your new page on a page already existing in Google’s index (preferrably one with a high PageRank). I usually see new domains/pages on the Google index in less than a week.

To check if your site is in the Google index click on http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.domain.com. Don’t forget to replace www.domain.com with your own. If you get “Your search - site:www.domain.com - did not match any documents”, then your site is not in the index.