Search Engine / SEO News From Google
Cheers to the Google Webmaster team for this great sitemap FAQ post. Google makes some great basic points and delivers the sitemap phenomena in a easy to understand fashion. Some valuable tips we liked...
- Sitemaps do not guarantee crawls nor indexing.
- A sitemap will not help your pages rank any better.
- If you set the "Priority" of all your urls the same, you might as well not bothered at all.
- "Priority", "frequency", and other Meta data are not necessary.. They only serve to help Google and other search engines know more about your content/pages.
- Sitemaps and submission of your sitemap to Google doesn't hurt your site, rather it serves to make your pages easier to crawl.
- While you can now put your sitemap just about anywhere, Google is really the only one supporting this protocol... For now.
- The recommended sitemap markup is XML for universal compliance, per Sitemaps.org.
- You can use your sitemap to help Google to decide what url is the best candidate for a particular page, if others exist. There are however no guarantees, and watch the duplicate content.
- You can submit sitemaps for every section of your site if you like, but best to use a sitemap index file to let the search engines know about them.
- We will add this.. If you request the removal of a particular section or url using the Google Webmaster url removal tool, make sure it is not listed in your sitemap... Or it will be denied.
If you are not changing your sitemaps out regularly, when you do generate
a new sitemap
ping the search engines and let them know about it.
Search Engine / SEO News From Yahoo
On January 22 2008, Yahoo announced yet another algorithm and processes update was underway. The date today is 2/4/2008 and there is no report of its completion, even though it was noted to be "completed soon" on 1/22/2008. As in the past, you will see rank changes, shuffling, and inherently some issues with Yahoo's index until it is completed.
The big news last week was a 44.6 billion dollar offer to "combine" Yahoo and MSN made by Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer on 1/31/2008. In his letter, Ballmer indicates that Microsoft would acquire controlling interest in Yahoo, and that Microsoft would make Yahoo shareholders able to convert their Yahoo common shares to either Microsoft common stock or cash.
Yahoo answered the bid on 2/1/2008 with this press release. Yahoo is very vulnerable to a less than welcome advance to shareholder domination techniques, as they possess no controlling interest shares or classes with the ability to circumvent such an advance.
While we are all watching to see what will happen, Google is none to happy with the idea.