Some Google questions answered
I have just stumbled across this very interesting interview with Venessa Fox, who works for Google.
Having recently started to include an xml sitemap in a couple of my sites, I never quite understood their significance. They are not sitemaps in the traditional sense; a page similar to a table of contents. Instead, the new standard for sitemaps are only for the benefit of those crawling webbots, so that they can find all of your web pages. I actually thought that the job of webbots was to follow links from the homepage, but perhaps they need better directions and a little help once in a while, especially with complicated sites.
Venessa also discusses a little about Duplicate content and the filtering process undertaken by Google.