If you are running your sites from a dedicated server or a VPS, you can install and make use of this tool immediately. If you use a shared server, you will have to wait till your web hosting company installs it on the server and makes it available to their customers.

Sitemap is simply a file (in XML) that contains information about which URLs on your website should be indexed by a search engine. It also contains additional information about when it was last updated, how important it is, etc.

Having a sitemap doesn't guarantee inclusion in search engines. But it does help the search engines in crawling your site.

For more information about the sitemap protocol visit sitemaps.org

The Google sitemap generator is a lot more sophisticated than any existing third party sitemap tool. Google calls it a next-generation tool. In it's normal configuration it starts up at sever boot and constantly monitors your website. In time it will have exact details about how often each page updated, how popular each page is and more (it monitors visitor logs). The meta-data it creates will be very accurate (most site generation tools simply insert approximate and random metadata into sitemaps).

Privacy Concerns

The fact that the sitemap generator has access to everything on the server will make a lot of people nervous.

The Google Sitemap Generator is opensource. According to Google, you can examine the source code and verify that no private information is being sent out. The sitemap XML file alone will be sent to Google and other search engines. The sitemap file contains only a list of URLs and the normal sitemap meta data.

While it works on most web server configurations, we can't use it straight away because we don't use Apache for our websites (we use lighttpd on Debian). If you use Apache or Microsoft IIS on a dedicated server or VPS, have a look at the Google Sitemap Generator Installation instructions.

Link to the official Google blog post.