The Search Engine Blog

I always love a free tool, but I’m looking this gift horse in the mouth. Google is offering a free sitemap generator that you install on your server. (You’ll need admin rights.) This tool automatically creates and updates sitemap files but also monitors server traffic. This information is reflected in the sitemap file. Now who wants to freely give even more data to Google? While the concept sounds great, a red flag goes up for me. While I don’t mind them being notified of new pages, knowing my traffic by accessing my server traffic is one step too far. While it may help me (or not), what is Google doing with that data? Where’s my piece of that financial pie?

The question is, can Google know how much traffic I’m receiving from their competitors, where my links are coming from and a whole bunch of other goodies. It smacks of the analytics code data they collect and then share…perhaps with your competitors. Am I being paranoid?

googlesitemapgenerator – Google Code