The Google search engine has released a new service allowing webmasters to submit a complete list of all the pages on their sites for inclusion in Google's index. They call it Google Sitemaps (Beta). Simply put, you create an XML sitemap, using the format specified by Google, upload it to your server, and notify Google about the file. Google will download that file, and based on it's contents, spider your site and update it's index.

Rapid Sitemaps was designed to quickly and easily create these sitemaps, exactly according to Google's specifications, without you having to know anything about XML, Google's specifications, or anything else technical. We've tried to make it both easy to use and versatile, to make creating your Google Sitemap XML files as simple as possible.

· Filters
There may be times when you don't want to include certain files or folders in your sitemap; you might have printer-friendly versions of your pages that you don't want indexed, or you might have a script on your site, that redirects visitors to other sites. Rapid sitemaps allows you to set up filters for your spiders, to exclude any files you don't want.

· Complete control over file attributes
Rapid Sitemaps gives you complete control over every file in your list, allowing you to manually add or delete files, and change the priority, last-updated date and change frequency, either on a file-by-file basis, or for whole folders at once.

· Upload via FTP
Your Sitemap file does no good on your local computer, so Rapid Sitemaps has the facility to upload the file to your live server using FTP.

· Notify Google
Once your sitemap is on your live server, you need to let Google know about it, and Rapid Sitemaps lets you do this at the click of a button.

· Yahoo! URL lists
Yahoo! has released something similar to Google's Sitemaps system, that allows you to submit a simple list of URLs to Yahoo! for indexing. Very little is known about this system, but we've included support for creating these files in Rapid Sitemaps version 2.0 anyway.

Limitations:

· Only allows you to save 10 urls into your sitemaps