WebProNews - sitemaps

Get Your Videos Indexed in Google Results

Chris Crum — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:01:14 +0000

Google wants webmasters who offer video content to be able to get their videos displayed in search results more easily. The company has announced that that it now supports Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa, which are both markup formats that allow webmasters to specify information that is important to video indexing.

"While we've become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we'd certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters," says Google's Michael Cohen, Product Manager for the Video Search Team.

The formats cater to simple things like titles and descriptions within the HTML of a video page. Google by the way also suggests that webmasters make their markup on video pages appear in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash.

On top of supporting the aforementioned formats, Google has also kicked off a series of Webmaster Central Blog posts, which are aimed at giving tips to get your videos indexed. One subject they have already discussed is the submission of video sitemaps.

Webmasters can submit their video sitemaps to Google via Webmaster Tools. The video sitemap uses the Sitemap protocol, but it also has additional video-specific tags. The details on how to create a video sitemap are explained here.

Keep an eye the Webmaster Central Blog for further tips in the near future. You can see what Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa look like here.

Google Addresses Sitemaps Issues for News Publishers

Chris Crum — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:58:20 +0000

Google has acknowledged some issues that Google News publishers have encountered with Webmaster Tools. The company posted to the Google News blog to let publishers know what the issues were and that they are working on fixing them.

"While there may be some sawdust and loose nails lying around at the moment, it won't be long before a sturdy new edifice has been completed, and we think publishers will agree that the hard work will have been worth it," says Abe Epton of the Publsiher Support Team. Epton points out the following two issues:

- Webmaster Tools may report an incorrect "Last downloaded" date for News sitemaps, display a strange number of articles indexed, or display a News sitemap as "Pending" () even though Google News is already crawling the sitemap. The best way to determine if we're crawling a sitemap or not is to check your server logs for Googlebot.

- From time to time, it may become necessary to resubmit your sitemap (for example, if the Type switches from News to Web). In order to do so, don't click the "Resubmit" button at the bottom of your sitemap list; instead, click the "Submit a Sitemap" link, select Google News from the Type dropdown box, and give us your sitemap's URL.

A couple months ago, Google posted a Frequently Asked Questions Page for publishers who either have their content currently picked up by Google News or are looking to do so. This is a good resource for publishers to keep bookmarked in case they have issues. Keeping an eye on the Google News blog is also a good idea.

Earlier this year, it was discovered that Gooogle had added over 20,000 publishers to Google News in a year's time. There's no telling how much that will increase in another year's time.

Attention Webmasters: Google Sitemaps Updates

Chris Crum — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:35:35 +0000

Google has been working on updates to how it uses sitemaps. Considering research highlighted in this study (pdf), which showed how search engines find new and changed content faster with sitemaps, webmasters should take note.

For one, Google and the other search engines that make up sitemaps.org are now supporting as many as 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files. In the past, they only supported 1,000. With this increased limit, webmasters can submit up to 2.5 billion URLs with one sitemap index.

Google's Webmaster Tools design update shows users all sitemap files that were submitted for a verified site. By the way, here's a brief look at the update:

"This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file," notes John Müller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. In addition, the indexed URL count for sitemap files in Webmaster Tools is "more precise" according to Müller.

XSD schemas have been updated to allow sitemap extensions. This allows for the creation of better sitemaps through the verification of more features. Müller says that sitemap file processing is also much faster than before, meaning the time it takes to submit a sitemap file, process it and see initial data, is much shorter.

The question is, are you taking advantage of all of this? If you don't use sitemaps or aren't sure if you're doing it the right way, I would suggest perusing the following resources:

- The Study Mentioned Earlier - Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty

- Sitemaps.org

- Google's Sitemaps FAQs

- Google's Sitemaps Help Center

- Googles Forum Search

Make it Easier for Google to Crawl Your Videos

Chris Crum — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:43:30 +0000

Last week, Google announced the end of some of its services, and among them was the ability for users to upload videos to Google Video. They said they would be refocusing their attention on building a more comprehensive video search engine, and why not? They've already got YouTube.

Just because they're putting a stop to uploading videos to Google Video, doesn't mean that you can't still submit your videos to them. By the way, Google Video Product Manager Amit Paunikar notes that Google Video search algorithms power YouTube as well as universal search.

Google has simplified the process for submitting sitemaps, and extended Video sitemaps support to include Media RSS feed. That said, Google offers the advice of including the following things in your sitemaps to make your videos easier to find:

1. Landing page URL: This is the page where the video is hosted. It's better to have a unique landing page for each video on your site.

2. Video thumbnail URL: Thumbnails provide a strong visual cue to the user. Your video thumbnail should be representative of a snapshot from the video, and should not be misleading in any way.

3. Title & Description: If these are accurate and descriptive, they not only help Google understand your video, but also help users choose the best video search result. Providing information about category, keyword tags and duration is always helpful.

As I recently discussed, video is becoming increasingly important to search. Making it easier for Google to crawl your videos has to help.

Google Introduces New Open Source Sitemap Generator

Chris Crum — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:54:04 +0000

Google has introduced a new Sitemap Generator for webmasters to help them create better sitemap files. Google had previously introduced one back in 2005, and watched many other people make their own, but this one is different they say.

"While most Sitemap generators either crawl websites or list the files on a server, we have created a different kind of Sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to automatically create and maintain different kinds of Sitemap files," says Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller.

The new Sitemap Generator is open source, and finds new and modified URLs from server traffic, log files, or files on the server. Then it can create the following sitemap files:

- XML Sitemaps
- Mobile Sitemaps
- Code Search Sitemaps (for source code you make available to users)

The Generator will also ping Google Blog Search and other search engines that support the sitemaps.org standard for all new and modified URLs (you can optionally include the URLs of the Sitemap files in your robots.txt file).

If you're unsure how to get started, Mueller says, "Google Sitemap Generator is a server plug-in that can be installed on both Linux/Apache and Microsoft IIS Windows-based servers. As with other server-side plug-ins, you will need to have administrative access to the server to install it. You can find detailed information for the installation in the Google Sitemap Generator documentation."

Help and support for Google's new Sitemaps Generator are available. There is a help group as well as a Webmaster Help Forum.

Google To Auto-Sort Sitemap Formats

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:29:32 +0000

Submitting sitemaps to Google has been simplified, the company announced this morning. Webmasters will no longer have to specify which type of sitemap they are submitting. Google will determine the filetype for them.

Google still prefers webmasters use Google Webmaster Tools for submission, though, but they also accept files listed in the robots.txt file, or submitted via the HTTP ping method.

The XML sitemap file format can be used for all web pages, which is also supported by all search engine. If a webmaster doesn’t trust Google to sift through their file types, control freaks can bask in their own specificity via other Google-supported file formats:

RSS and Atom 1.0 feeds

Text files with URLs

XML sitemap files for video search, indexed in Google Video

Media-RSS feeds for video search

XML sitemap files for Google Code Search, indexed in Google Code Search

XML sitemap files for mobile web pages

XML sitemap files for geo-data, for geographic data in KML or GeoRSS format

XML sitemap for News, a special format for those registered with Google News

More info

On-Demand XML Sitemaps for Custom Search

Navneet Kaushal — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:00:39 +0000

Google has come up with another nice webmaster tool.

They have come with the launch of their On-Demand Indexing that could actually assist the webmasters in enhancing their experience with Google Webmaster services in a better way! With help of this tool, the users can inform Google about the newly updated pages of their websites, or the ones that are new!

How it will assist the webmasters?

As a result, Custom Search will immediately schedule these pages for crawl, index and even serve the pages in their CSEs with a short span of one day!

“How do you tell us about these URLs? You guessed it… provide a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools, like you always do, and tell Custom Search about it. Just go to the CSE control panel, click on the Indexing tab, select your On-Demand Sitemap, and hit the "Index Now" button. You can tell us which of these URLs are most important to you via the priority and lastmod attributes that you provide in your Sitemap. Each CSE has a number of pages allocated within the On-Demand Index, and with these attributes, you can us which are most important for indexing. If you need greater allocation in the On-Demand index, as well as more customization controls, Google Site Search provides a range of options.”

“Some important points to remember:

You only need to submit your Sitemaps once in Webmaster Tools. Custom Search will automatically list the Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools and you can decide which Sitemap to select for On-Demand Indexing.

Your Sitemap needs to be for a website verified in Webmaster Tools , so that we can verify ownership of the right URLs.

In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. You can use "Webmaster Tools > Crawl Errors > URLs restricted by robots.txt" or check yourrobots.txt file to ensure that you're not blocking us from crawling these pages.

Submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com.”-GOOGLE

Comments

Google Debuts Webmaster Tools API

Navneet Kaushal — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:51:30 +0000

According to Google Webmaster Central Blog, after numerous requests from Webmasters to integrate Webmaster Tools for third-parties, Google has finally released Webmaster Tools API, a tool that integrates API (Application Programming Interface) into Webmaster Tools.

The debut version of the Google Webmaster Tools API supports the following features:

Managing Websites:

Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools.

Add your sites to Webmaster Tools.

Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools.

Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools.

Working with Sitemaps:

Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps.

Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools.

Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools.

As of now, the Webmaster Tools API offers a limited subset of all the functionality that Webmaster Tools provide. However, as this is the initial phase of the Webmaster Tools API, there are going to be a lot of updates and improvements for certain.

For all those Webmasters who are interested in this tool and would like to make the best out of it, here is the link to Developer's Guide for the Webmaster Tools Data API. Check out the guide and get on with more improvisations.

Comments

'Doorway Page' Newly Defined By Google

Navneet Kaushal — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:44:35 +0000

According to Search Engine Watch, Google has changed the way it defines 'Doorway Pages'.

The new definition at Google Webmaster Help Center for 'Doorway Pages':

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our Webmaster guidelines.

However, the cached version of the same still shows the old version:

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

In the new version of the definition, key sentences, words and adjectives have been changed and replaced by more generic terms. Discussions are on at the Search Engine Watch Forum. It seems that Google has tweaked the definition in order to make the look of the page more subtle than technical.

Comments

Getting Ranked In Google News

Mike Sachoff — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:02:12 +0000

The Google News Team has an interesting blog post about the "truths and myths" of how Google includes and ranks articles.

Some of the facts that stand out include "Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH. While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself."

Google News Logo
(Photo Credit: Google)

"Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we've crawled it, they won't be reflected on our site."

Google says it is working on being able to re-crawl articles that have been updated but currently does not re-crawl update articles.

It's a myth that timing of an article improves ranking. Google says," Whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won't affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster."

Having a sitemap will not help your rankings but there are reasons to have a sitemap. "First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl."

"Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in."

Redesigning a site could affect coverage in Google News. "If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team."

Using AdSense on a site will not improve article rankings." We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn't be very objective!"

Sitemaps Protocol Scaled For Cross-Host Support

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:25:19 +0000

One sitemap may now support multiple sites on different hosts thanks to a new addition to the Sitemaps protocol.

One sitemap to rule them all? After today, the question will be "why not?"

The Yahoo Search blog announced an update to sitemaps during the SMX West event. Along with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo disclosed a new feature for cross-host support for sitemaps.

"To ensure validity of this metadata, Sitemaps have previously been required to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contain," Yahoo Search noted. "This requirement forced the Sitemaps files to be hosted on the same servers as the actual site content."

With the change, the sitemap may be hosted on a different host, with the ability to support multiple sites on separate hosts. Webmasters will need to add a line to their robots.txt file to direct crawlers to the differently-hosted sitemap.

The official Sitemaps FAQ has been updated to reflect the support for separately hosted sitemaps.

Yahoo Search cited a couple of concerns from webmasters that led to this latest update. Webmasters wanted to be able to keep user-facing content separate from feeds, as well as the ability to manage a number of websites from one sitemap.

"We hope this enhancement helps address those needs," the announcement said.

Google Addresses Webmaster Concerns

Navneet Kaushal — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:13:27 +0000

A couple of days back Google's Susan Moskwa & Trevor Foucher published FAQs about sitemaps, see: Google's FAQs on Sitemaps. The FAQs followed from their experience at SES Chicago 2007.

Now, Michael Wyszomierski releases notes answering issues faced by many webmasters who he interacted with at PubCon Vegas 2007.

Here are the webmaster's concerns:

Site Verification Files and Meta Tags

Several webmasters asked, "Is it necessary to keep the verification meta tag or HTML file in place to remain a verified owner in Webmaster Tools?" The answer is yes, you should keep your verification file or meta tag live to maintain your status as a verified owner. These verification codes are used to control who has access to the owner-specific tools for your site in Webmaster Tools. To ensure that only current owners of a site are verified, we periodically re-check to see if the verification code is in place, and if it is not, you will get unverified for that site. While we're on the topic:

Site Verification Best Practices

If you have multiple people working on your site with Webmaster Tools, it's a good idea to have each person verify the site with his or her own account, rather than using a shared login. That way, as people come and go, you can control the access appropriately by adding or removing verification files or meta tags for each account.

You may want to keep a list of these verification codes and which owner they are connected to, so you can easily control access later. If you lose track, you can always use the "Manage site verification" option in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to force all site owners to reverify their accounts.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

What's the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories? When it comes to Google, there aren't major differences between the two, so when you're making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors. Following PubCon, our very own Matt Cutts outlined many of the key issues in a post on his personal blog. In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you'll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you've verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.

Underscores vs. Dashes

Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs. In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you're providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time. Even without punctuation, there's a good chance we'll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a "big leopard" and not a "bigle opard." While using separators is a good practice, it's likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.

Keywords in URLs

We were also asked if it is useful to have relevant keywords in URLs. It's always a good idea to be descriptive across your site, with titles, ALT attributes, and yes, even URLs, as they can be useful signals for users and search engines. This can be especially true with image files, which otherwise may not have any text for a search engine to consider. Imagine you've taken a picture of your cat asleep on the sofa. Your digital camera will likely name it something like IMG_2937.jpg. Not exactly the most descriptive name. So unless your cat really looks like an IMG_2937, consider changing the filename to something more relevant, like adorable-kitten.jpg. If you have a post about your favorite cat names, it's much easier to guess that a URL ending in my-favorite-cat-names would be the relevant page, rather than a URL ending in postid=8652. For more information regarding issues with how Google understands your content, check out our new content analysis feature in Webmaster Tools, as well as our post on the URL suggestions feature of the new Google Toolbar.

Moving to a new IP address

We got a question about changing a site's IP address, and provided a few steps you can take a webmaster to make sure things go smoothly. Here's what you can do:

Change the TTL (Time To Live) value of your DNS configuration to something short, like five minutes (300 seconds). This will tell web browsers to re-check the IP address for your site every five minutes.

Copy your content to the new hosting environment, and make sure it is live on the new IP address.

Change your DNS settings so your hostname points to the new IP address.

Check your logs to see when Googlebot starts crawling your site on the new IP address. To make sure it's really Googlebot who's visiting, you can verify Googlebot by following these instructions. You can then log into Webmaster Tools and monitor any crawl errors. Once Googlebot is happily crawling on the new IP address, you should be all set as far as Google is concerned.

To make sure everyone got the message of your move, you may want to keep an eye out for visits to your old IP address before shutting it down.

Proxies

A few webmasters were concerned that proxy services are being indexed with copies of their content. While it's often possible to find duplicate copies of your content in our results if you look hard enough, the original source is most likely going to be ranked higher than a proxy copy. However, if you find this not to be the case, please drop us some URLs in the Webmaster Help Group. There are many Googlers including myself who monitor this group and escalate issues appropriately.

You can join the follow-up conversation in the Webmaster Help Group.

Comments

Answers To Google Sitemaps Questions

Ross Dunn — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:11:03 +0000

Susan Moskwa and Trever Voucher from Google's Webmaster Tools Team published a synopsis of the questions they received at Chicago's recent Search Engine Strategies Conference.

If you have ever had a question about Google Sitemaps and the effect they may or may not have on your site, this is a helpful read.

Get the answers to the following questions:

I submitted a Sitemap, but my URLs haven't been [crawled/indexed] yet. Isn't that what a Sitemap is for?
If it doesn't get me automatically crawled and indexed, what does a Sitemap do?
Will a Sitemap help me rank better?
If I set all of my pages to have priority 1.0, will that make them rank higher (or get crawled faster) than someone else's pages that have priority 0.8?
Is there any point in submitting a Sitemap if all the metadata (, , etc.) is the same for each URL, or if I'm not sure it's accurate?
I've heard about people who submitted a Sitemap and got penalized shortly afterward. Can a Sitemap hurt you?
Where can I put my Sitemap? Does it have to be at the root of my site?
Can I just submit the site map that my webmaster made of my site? I don't get this whole XML thing.
Which Sitemap format is the best?
If I have multiple URLs that point to the same content, can I use my Sitemap to indicate my preferred URL for that content?
Does the placement of a URL within a Sitemap file matter? Will the URLs at the beginning of the file get better treatment than the URLs near the end?
If my site has multiple sections (e.g. a blog, a forum, and a photo gallery), should I submit one Sitemap for the site, or multiple Sitemaps (one for each section)?

Again here is the link to the

Google sitemaps Q&A

Comments

Sitemaps? Just The FAQs, Ma'am

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:20:53 +0000

Google has been a sitemaps backer for some time, and they provided some answers to questions webmasters asked during SES Chicago last month.

Through the use of the Sitemaps protocol, site publishers should see their pages indexed quicker and more accurately in search engines that support it, as all the major engines do. Google continued to evangelize their use at a recent industry conference, Search Engine Strategies, which took place in Chicago.

At the Google Webmaster Central blog, they addressed several questions about sitemaps. Questions ranged from the basic (Will a sitemap help me rank better?) to advanced (If I have multiple URLs that point to the same content, can I use my Sitemap to indicate my preferred URL for that content?)

We thought this question and answer was of particular interest:

Q: If my site has multiple sections (e.g. a blog, a forum, and a photo gallery), should I submit one Sitemap for the site, or multiple Sitemaps (one for each section)?

A: You may submit as few or as many Sitemaps as you like (up to these limits). Organize them in whatever way you find easiest to maintain. If you create multiple Sitemaps, you can use a Sitemap Index file to list them all.

The conversation about Sitemaps extended into the comments, where one person asked if Google is actively using the Sitemap Autodiscovery entry in the robots.txt file. Google's Susan Moskwa, who submitted the post, answered that in the affirmative, and pointed to additional help for that.

Google Video Sitemaps Generator Released

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:29:24 +0000

A free tool from British-based Microsoft MVP Marc Liron helps webmasters bash out video sitemaps suitable for Google's indexing.

Liron thinks he has beaten everyone to the punch when it comes to creating video sitemaps. His Google Video Sitemap Generator for Windows and Mac platforms takes webmasters through a three step process to build one for posted videos.

In an email, Liron said he quickly got fed up hand-coding the XML for video sitemaps after Google announced their support for the new protocol. That led to him crafting the Generator, currently in version 1.0 with new tweaks promised soon.

Google announced video sitemap support shortly before Christmas. Their extension of the Sitemap protocol lets webmasters submit all video files and relevant metadata to Google in one file.

The base Sitemap protocol enables webmasters to enhance the quality of the indexing search engines that follow the protocol can perform. Unlike the base protocol, only Google supports the video extension presently.

Sitemaps should appeal to the early adopters among those webmasters who publish videos. If Google is having an easier time finding videos when the new Sitemap protocol is in use, no one will want to lag behind the competition in adopting it themselves.

An SEO Checklist for the New Year

Rene LeMerle — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:02:46 +0000

While many are using this time to reminisce about the year that was, here's a simple SEO check list for those of you that are already looking for bigger and better SEO results in 2008. If more free traffic from the search engines is your new year's resolution - then commit to these essentials:

1. Stop Stabbing in the Dark - Keyword Intelligence

Start 2008 with some intelligent keyword analysis. Find out what your potential customers are searching for and create your keyword hit list. Don't under estimate the value of long tail too - searchers are getting smarter and relying on longer keyword phrases to filter out irrelevant results.

2. Master Your Meta Data

Once you've got your keyword hit list, it's time to get your Meta data right (the code optimization at the foundation of good SEO). When reviewing your code, focus on the Meta elements that matter - "titles" and "descriptions" are where you get your real ranking value. So commit early to reviewing all your key web page's Meta tags - and avoid the usual pitfalls of keyword competition between your pages or even worse - duplicate tags across pages.

3. Search Engine Webmaster center Sign-ups

Since the search engines have been kind enough to provide site owners with free webmaster tools (i.e. Google Webmaster Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live Search Webmaster portal), do yourself a favor and sign up. Verification is simple, and the indexing diagnostics and analysis should be a part of your regular monthly (or even weekly) reviews.

4. Liven up Your Link Building

Yes, confusion and controversy has reigned supreme in the link discussion over 2007, but one thing still remains - your links still drive your ranking. So in 2008, seek some serious link love.

Fee based links

- there's still a range of important links that come at a cost which provide valuable link "juice" (e.g. Directories such as Yahoo!'s Directory). Whether we like it or not, they charge a fee for the process of reviewing submitted sites - and this scrutiny ensures the value of the listings and links.

Free links

- there are many ways to get free relevant links back to your site, they just take time and perseverance. Whether you contact site owners directly, create affiliations with relevant industry groups, or create and post articles on other sites - they're all valuable additions to your SEO plan.

Earned links

- there's nothing better than earned links. If you provide unique information or resources on your website that others find useful or relevant, then the links will come. This sort of content not only helps from the purpose of drawing in relevant links, but also helps establish your business as a serious operator in the industry. Good examples of this content includes glossaries, whitepapers, industry reports etc.

5. Commit to Creating Content

Top ranking is driven by fresh quality content. Whether you choose to create the content on your site, or elsewhere with a link back - regularly created relevant content keeps the search engine spiders crawling your website.

To start with, take your keyword hit list and give all your existing content the once over. If you've got low keyword density (i.e. not many of your hit list keywords are in your web page text), it's time to do some fresh copy writing.

Once you've covered off the web page copy essentials, commit the rest of the year to creating new content on your website. Even a couple of keyword rich new pages per month will make a significant difference to smaller websites - and there's no easier way to do this than with a blog (see: Embrace social SEO below)

6. Understand Your SEO Successes with Analytics

I'm amazed at how many people are still measuring their success with primitive hit counters or even worse, no analytics at all. Considering the range of free services out there - if you're not using a half decent website analytics service, then 2008 is the year to change! And more importantly - understand the proper measures of your success.

Successful SEO isn't always going to equal more sales, so make sure to track the right metrics such as rankings on your keyword hit list, and organic traffic from search engines (yes most analytics services will show you this metric).

7. Get Serious about Site Structure & Sitemaps

When was the last time you looked at your website structure? Website elements such as URLs and navigation between pages can play a major role in your SEO success. So use start of 2008 as a chance to review these site structure elements to ensure they are reinforcing your SEO goals. (i.e. do your URLs include relevant keywords, is there strong linkage between your web pages, and is your Sitemap up to date - assuming you have one).

8. Get Social with Web 2.0 SEO

The last item on the SEO checklist for 2008 is the social web. It's one of the greatest tools for SEO and as it generally costs no more than a bit of your time on regular basis - it is a must if you're serious about your rankings. There's a lot of social media to get lost in, so to focus your initial strategies, get started with the following:

1. Set-up your own blog:

It's a simple way to create new keyword rich and relevant content for your website and relatively simple to integrate.

2. Social bookmark all your content:

many social bookmark services (i.e. del.icio.us) get crawled by the search engines and will provide some useful links back to your site.

3. Engage in the Industry Conversations:

Make it a weekly ritual to visit your favorite industry blogs. Then on a regular basis actually contribute to the conversations by adding relevant useful comments. Engaging commenting not only builds your profile, but can also provide valuable links back to your website.

Okay, so this is not the definitive list of SEO strategies (that would be a much longer article), but as 2008 draws rapidly closer, if you commit to at least all of the above on a regular basis in 2008 - then you're sure to get much closer to your ranking goals.

Comments

Google Accepting Video Sitemaps

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 11:57:16 +0000

Google will make use of an extension to the Sitemaps protocol to do a better job of indexing the videos people publish.

Indexing text data became old hat to Google and every other search engine over the past few years. Multimedia, especially video, has everyone's attention these days (including Hollywood screenwriters.)

To enable better video indexing, Google has taken the lead in introducing and accepting Video Sitemaps. "By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata," said the Webmaster Central blog.

That does imply some extra work for the webmaster, in the need to create a second sitemap for Google to index. One commenter on the blog asked why the video elements can't just be added to the regular sitemap, since they have their own namespace.

Google's John Mueller replied, saying it might not be practical, but said he would pass the suggestion along.

It appears Google is acting solo in working with video sitemaps at this time. Other search engines will have to decide whether or not to follow Google's lead in accepting this extension.

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Google Analyzes New Webmaster Tools

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:13:49 +0000

Content analysis and Sitemap detail debuted as new features available on Google's Webmaster Central.

Ever since we first chatted with now-former Googler Vanessa Fox about webmaster tools, Google has released new capabilities for those on a fairly regular schedule.

That routine notched another mark with the debut of content analysis and sitemap details from Google Webmaster Tools. Jonathan Simon described these at the Webmaster Central blog.

Content analysis looks at three main categories: title tag issues; meta description issues; and non-indexable content issues. These appear in the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools.

Title tags may be too short or too long in Google's estimation, and if a meta description tag looks odd, Google will flag that as well.

"While these pointers won't directly help you rank better, they may help your site display better titles and snippets in search results, and this can increase visitor traffic," said Simon.

Webmasters using Sitemaps to permit better indexing of their sites by search crawlers have access to additional information with the new Sitemaps Details page in Tools. This shows what Google knows about the Sitemaps the webmaster submitted.

Depending on the site, the Sitemap Details may show the sitemap type; total number of valid URLs; the number of listed URLs in Google's index; and the dates the sitemap was submitted to and downloaded by Google.

Simon said the new Details page also shows any errors or warnings encountered when Google last crawled specific pages. This allows the webmaster to spend less time trying to figure out how many pages Google indexed from the Sitemap.

On her Search Engine Land post, Fox chimed in on the new features by noting the availability of Video Sitemaps. For sites that use video, these Sitemaps could be the key to being included in web search results as well as video searches.

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Google Explains Meta Tags

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:33:45 +0000

Search engines pay attention to some tags, and none to others. Remember when the 'keywords' meta tag mattered? Ah, the good old days.

John Mueller placed a useful post from Zurich on the Webmaster Central blog at Google, where he delves into the issue of meta tags. Back in the day, meta tags like 'keywords' helped webmasters get their sites indexed appropriately.

It took next to no time for spammers to start clogging 'keywords' to the point where they became useless. As Mueller reminded everyone in an answer to a comment, Google isn't looking at them for indexing purposes:

(W)e generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won't count against you.

Plenty of tags do work favorably for pages, as do Sitemaps, which enjoy support from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Meta tags can control robot behavior, or in the case of an individual crawler like Google's Googlebot, affect a single robot's actions with certain directives like meta name=robots or name=googlebot:

Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):
noindex: prevents the page from being indexed (see "Block or remove pages using meta tags") nofollow: don't follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see "Block or remove pages using meta tags") nosnippet: don't show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results (see "Prevent or remove snippets") noodp: don't use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project a.k.a. dmoz.org) to generate a title or snippet for this page (see "How do I change my site's title and description?") noarchive: don't display a "Cached" link for this page in the search results (see "Prevent or remove cached pages") unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time (see "Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility")

Mueller noted the default rule is "index, follow" when this meta tag is not in place on a page, or if it is not targeted to the visiting spider when it arrives.

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SES Chicago: Sitemaps Discussed

Doug Caverly — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:08:14 +0000

Webmasters can face a number of issues, and may hope that sitemaps can cure the bulk of them.

So a panel at SES Chicago weighed sitemaps’ pros and cons.

SES Chicago returns, and WebProNews is on hand to bring you reports and videos from the Windy City. Enjoy our coverage this week.

To start things off, Searching for Profit’s Amanda Watlington stated that there are too many people who believe creating a sitemap will solve all their indexing problems. No one exactly leaped up to contradict her.

Instead, Vivek Pathak of Ask.com stressed that sitemaps do not act as reverse links.

They may improve crawl efficiency and completeness, but thus far have been used more by low-quality sites than anything else.

Jeremy Clem believes in submitting sitemaps anyway, though.

Clem, who works at DoubleClick Performics, has also seen improved crawl frequency and indexation, and said that sitemaps allow webmasters to get a more intelligent crawl and lead to increased tracking and reporting.

Google’s Trevor Foucher continued the conversation by saying that “it’s a complicated answer” on the subject of whether or not sitemaps will help someone rank better.

But he agreed that they can help get sites noticed, and pointed out that they will definitely not hurt anything.

Finally, Danny Sullivan, the session’s moderator, asked, “When will we get to trusted sitemaps?”

Sitemaps are, after all, heavily used by spammers.

Google’s Foucher answered, “That sounds like a difficult thing to do. But it would be nice.”

WebProNews Internet reporter/anchor Kara Ratliff contributed to this article.

7 Steps to Get Your New Site Indexed in 24 hours

Michael Jensen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:47:20 +0000

Most SEO’s will advise you to buy an existing site/domain (lots of age benefit), but there are times when you need to start from scratch with a fresh domain.

It can sometimes take a couple of weeks to get a new domain indexed by Google (even longer to start ranking!). In order to speed up the process of getting your site indexed quickly, even in 24 hours, follow the steps outlined below:

1) Create 5 pages of content

Skip the “under construction” page and write several pages of real content, at least a few paragraphs.

2) Create Internal Links to your Pages

Put the content in a template with a menu structure to make this step easier. You can find free templates at oswd.org and other places, at least to get started. Link to the content through the menu, and if you have a major landing page, link to it from the content of a page or two.

3) Tag on Social Bookmarking Sites

After just a few minutes to create an account with these sites you can submit a link to your site. This gives you an instant way for Google and other search engines to find your site because these social bookmarking sites get visited by the search engine bots (like the Googlebot) quite regularly. A few bookmarking sites to recommend: Del.icio.us, BlinkList, StumbleUpon.com, and Furl. Make sure you tag them with common words, like those you find on their tag clouds (BlinkList has a good one, just scroll down on the page to see it).

4) Comment on popular and recent blogs (with your link)

Find 5 blogs that are fairly popular, relevant to your site, and have a recent blog post (last day or two). Read the post and add a comment that contributes to the discussion, including a link to your site in the URL field.

5) Create, Submit, and Ping your XML Sitemap

You can create a free XML sitemap here then upload the file to your site (just save it as sitemap.xml). Then ping Google with your sitemap by typing in the following URL in your browser, replacing the domain name with your own:

http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Next, create an account with Google Webmaster Central, add your site, and submit your XML sitemap.

6) Install Google Analytics

Add Google Analytics (free) to your site. Don’t forget to verify your site with them to get the data collection started.

7) Run some Google Ads

Create an account with Google Adwords and start running some ads, even if its just for the domain name, company name, or some long tail keywords. Google has to go to your site because of their quality score, which includes “your landing page quality”. Just spend a couple of bucks and it can help jumpstart the indexing.

With these steps, you should see your site indexed fairly quickly. I can’t guarantee the 24 hours, but it is possible. At the very least it will speed up the indexing significantly (from weeks to days). Look for the “googlebot” to visit in your site analytics. Then look for your site to show up with Google by doing a search with the site: operator (for example, site:sphinn.com). Enjoy!

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GoDaddy & Google Partner on Webmaster Tools

Navneet Kaushal — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:26:28 +0000

Go Daddy and Google collaborate to offer easy access to Webmaster Tools, informs the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

"Customers can more easily access Google Webmaster Tools. Go Daddy is a great partner, and we hope to educate more webmasters on how to make their site more search engine-friendly.

Go Daddy users will now see our link right in their hosting control center, and can launch Google Webmaster Tools directly from their hosting account. And Go Daddy makes the Google Webmaster Tools account creation process faster by adding the site, verifying the site, and submitting Sitemaps on behalf of hosting customers. Our tools show users how Google views their site, give useful stats like queries and links, diagnose problems, and share information with us in order to improve their site's visibility in search results.”

To praise or oppose, visit and leave a comment or opinion at Discussion group.

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Sitemaps Will Submit Sites to Yahoo Site Explorer

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 15:53:39 +0000

Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it’s now easier to submit your site to Yahoo Site Explorer: all you have to do is have a valid sitemap.xml file on your site.

With this feature, new stores as well as existing stores with ’sitemap.xml’ enabled will have access to the toolkit inside Site Explorer. Within a few hours of enabling, you’ll be able to locate your indexed pages and the links to your sites, as well as delete pages in the index or rewrite dynamic URLs. To double check if your site was auto-authenticated, take a look in the ‘Source’ column in the ‘My Sites’ page in Site Explorer.

At first glance, it seems like this may make it easier for others to “steal” your site in Site Explorer. However, you still have to authenticate your site ownership using an authentication key or a meta tag.

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Google Teaches Robots Tool About Sitemaps

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:23:49 +0000

The robots.txt analysis tool at Google Webmaster Central received some much-needed updating, and should be more effective for webmasters today.

Google Teaches Robots Tool About Sitemaps

Google followed up webmaster feedback about the need to upgrade the Webmaster Central robots.txt analysis tool with a new version. The latest update makes the tool capable of recognizing sitemap declarations and relative URLs.

The Webmaster Central blog announced the update and its implications. Webmasters can see if their sitemap's URL and scope test as valid, Google said.

Expanded reporting options for the analysis tool look much more useful. It will tell if multiple problems per line of robots.txt exist, instead of just stopping with the first problem noticed. Google said they have also improved analysis and validation.

We've previously noted two new features added to the Robots Exclusion Protocol, and Google mentioned them again in their most recent Webmaster Central post.

The unavailable_after META tag allows webmasters to control the presentation of pages in search results. If a webmaster tags a page as being unavailable_after a given date, it will not be returned in response to a relevant query after that time.

Google also noted the new X-Robots-Tag directive for non-HTML content. Items like PDFs and videos can be controlled with unavailable_after just as web pages can.

Unavailable_after appears to be a response to companies that have complained of Google's indexing and presentation of content that the content owners want to control. It provides a compromise between not indexing content at all, and having content available forever for searchers.

News organizations like AFP and Copiepresse have sued Google over its indexing practices, but declined to make robots.txt edits to keep the search engine out of their content. The page-level controls Google now recognizes with the unavailable_after and X-Robots-Tag directives should suit these groups, assuming they choose to use them.

Great Resource About Sitemaps

Duane Forrester — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:25:31 +0000

OK, so while working on a project to build a multi-thousand page series of sitemaps for our properties here at work, I found this resource: http://www.sitemaps.org/

The site is good at one thing,and one thing only - sharing information about sitemaps. Many folks today see them as a sort of Holy Grail. A way to magically improve search rankings, and it’s easy to see why.

A sitemap page helps your internal link architecture by adding a series of internal-facing links. It can help boost… page views if properly placed and sued by readers of a site. More links to explore means more likelihood of something interesting catching their eye. Finally, increases in inbound search traffic often result from a sitemap being included on a site.

Is it the sitemap that boosted the rankings?

Hardly.

All the sitemap did was provide a path for the spiders to find pages they previously couldn’t access. Sure, that fancy Javascript navigation sure is cool. but it’s also keeping spiders form finding and indexing all your pages. In such a case, the increased search traffic came form simply allowing the pages to be indexed. The pages themselves did the rest.

So, yeah, sitemaps are important. Are they the silver bullet? Nope.

Search rankings are a game of inches, not miles.

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Get Your Sitemap Discovered Automatically with your Robots.txt File

Michael Jensen — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:08:28 +0000

At Search Engine Strategies New York it was announced that you can now have your sitemap automatically discovered by configuring it in your Robots.txt file. It is simple and easy to do, you’ll just need to know the URL or web address of your sitemap.

First, open your Robots.txt file on your server for editing. Then you will need to add the following line to the end of the file (it can be anywhere, but the end is probably a good place).

Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Save the Robots.txt file with the new line for the sitemap URL. There you go! Your whole file may look something like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /somefolder/
Disallow: /somethingelse/
Sitemap: http://www.soloseo.com/sitemap.php

Search engines already come to your Robots.txt file when they visit your domain, so on their next crawl they will automatically find your sitemap file.

If you have a new site/domain you will probably still want to submit the sitemap URL to the search engines. To submit you can either submit the URL through their interfaces or use a ping.

Submit Sitemap to Google or Ping Google with your Sitemap

Submit Sitemap to Yahoo or Ping Yahoo with your Sitemap

Submit Sitemap to MSN Live.com

Info for Ask.com Sitemaps or Ping Ask.com by hitting this address:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=
http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

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SES: Search Supports Sitemaps Autodiscovery

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:44:57 +0000

Major search engines Ask, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo jointly announced at SES New York their support of a new feature that makes sitemaps more valuable to webmasters.

SES: Search Supports Sitemaps Autodiscovery

It's called autodiscovery, and those search engines, along with IBM, have embraced the sitemaps concept wholeheartedly. Webmasters can now place the location of their sitemaps inside a robots.txt file, where crawlers will find it proactively.

That saves some effort where webmasters had to submit sitemaps manually as they made changes to their site architectures. Ask.com recently added submission support for sitemaps, and their Infrastructure Product Manager, Vivek Pathak, will talk more about the subject as part of a morning session during today's SES New York conference proceedings.

Ahead of that session, Pathak discussed sitemaps at Ask's blog:

Comprehensiveness and freshness are key initiatives for every search engine, and with autodiscovery of sitemaps, everyone wins:

Webmasters save time with the ability to universally submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers

The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important

Searchers benefit from improved search experience with better comprehensiveness and freshness

Of course, neither autodiscovery nor manual submission guarantee pages will be added to the index. The pages must meet our quality criteria for inclusion in the index. And use of these submission methods does not influence ranking.

Sitemaps as a protocol gained a boost when Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo supported it openly in November 2006 at Sitemaps.org. Its utility gained approval and usage from a number of webmasters, and this latest development should enhance that appeal.

At the session, Google's Vanessa Fox noted Sitemaps.org will be available in many international languages.

Q&A - Google Sitemaps and Frames

Kalena Jordan — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:38:30 +0000

Dear Kalena...

I have two sites; One www.alpine-property.com is top of Google rankings for all my chosen keywords, it has no frames, daily updated content and lots of inbound links, so not surprising.

My other site www.alptitude.com is the dunce. Frames, static content and just a few inbound links. I have keyword friendly text in the no frames tag and a simple site map. I also have a few pages of no frames content, these are the pages indexed by Google. I obviously know how to fix this, but the time required to rewrite the site in a no frames way is very large, it has a lot of transactional code on a linked secure server which I use to run the business.

In the meantime I am interested in the effect of using the Google Sitemap tool. Will this eliminate the frames problem? The Google FAQs about this ask me to submit both the frameset url and the url of each target page. This sort of suggests that they will be able to index all the content.

Steve

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Steve

Thanks for the caffeine. The answer to your question is yes and no. Sure, Google might be able to index your frames pages outside of the frames-context and eventually match up your content and work out what your site's about. But why make it so difficult? And why take the risk when you can spend a little time bringing your site into the 21st century and ditching the frames?

It's not only search engines that the frames might offend. Searchers tend not to like frames-based sites either and unless you start taking your site seriously, you can't expect visitors to. It's not that difficult to replace your frames pages with more modern code.

If you want to continue pretending it's 1997, at least check Danny Sullivan's Search Engines and Frames Tutorial to make sure your frames pages are optimized as much as possible. Follow the instructions on Google's Webmaster Tools for frames-based sites, create an XML sitemap and track the indexing of all your pages to see if the framed ones get indexed. My bet is they don't.

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Ten Steps You Missed In Marketing Your Site

WebProNews Staff — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 16:56:43 +0000

A handful (ok, two handfuls) of tactics could separate the lackluster domain from the one that enables its owner to brag about business. Neglecting the tactics discussed at the Nixon McInnes marketing agency's blog post could represent a missed opportunity for webmasters. The bloggers at the UK-based firm came across an online poll about overlooked tactics in search marketing. With apologies to the original pollsters, we're tweaking their suggestions just a little for your consideration.

Use 301 redirects accurately
Integrate offline efforts with online projects
Coordinate paid and organic search data
Track actions with analytics to find valuable customers
Test and refine landing pages regularly
Buy domains and redirect them to enjoy their link value
Don't stint on design and usability spending
Blog to build rapport and credibility for your domain
Make use of Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer
Use 'Web 2.0' features, like tagging, widgets, etc, when it makes sense to do so

There could be a better site in your future, with some focused effort. ---

Should SEOs Avoid Sitemaps?

Mike McDonald — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:53:38 +0000

Rand Fishkin recently posted an interesting concept on his SEOmoz.org blog about sitemaps. For those of you keeping score at home, a sitemap is a document (typically xml) that sits on your server and helps search engine spiders crawl and index your site. Sounds great, right? Maybe… maybe not. Rand theorizes these sitemaps may actually be bad for your SEO efforts.

Should SEOs Avoid Sitemaps?

Consider this: what if this content - that would otherwise go unindexed- is now indexed but still suffering from whatever problems caused it to not be indexed in the first place. Is it a good idea for content with problems (index-preventing problems) to be indexed just because it was listed in the sitemap? If it’s indexed, how is the webmaster to know it had a problem?

So I suppose question then becomes, once it's indexed, does it matter? Whether by natural crawl or sitemap-assisted crawl, the content is now indexed, so where is the downside? In other words, if your problem is no longer a problem… is that a problem?

Now, Rand isn’t someone I’d categorize as a tin-foil hat wearing, conspiracy theorist loon (well not all of those anyway) and he has had a fair share of supportive comments on this issue from SEO luminaries like RustyBrick and David Naylor. Nonetheless, I still have a problem thinking of a sitemap as a negative thing. Unless there is some sort of value differentiation between naturally indexed and sitemap-assisted indexed content (which I doubt), the argument falls a bit flat I think.

As such, I figured I’d just go right to the source and ask a Googler. So, I fired off a quick email to Vanessa Fox, Product manager for Google’s Webmaster Central. Though she’s still overseas in Dublin after attending SES: London, she was able to weigh in on the issue stating (in no uncertain terms); “there's no difference in indexing based on how we found a page (either by links or by a Sitemap).”

Unless... these SEO folks are thinking about optimization beyond search engines. In this scenario, perhaps the motivation would be hunting down and addressing problem content/pages that were, for whatever reason less than ideal or flawed. This is certainly noble and good of course… but at the expense of having content indexed in the search engines? I really just can’t get my mind around taking the SE out of SEO. Sure some page may not be perfect, but can’t you just tweak it however it needs tweaking after it’s been indexed?

As for the issue of a sitemap possibly preventing or making it more difficult for webmasters to identify problems, Vanessa didn’t see that as a problem. She maintains that (sitemaps) “won't mask anything for a webmaster who is looking at potential site problems.”

Further to this point she added the following:

"If the pages aren't well-linked and have low PageRank, they are unlikely to rank well for queries, so that problem should also be obvious to the webmaster, even if the pages are indexed. I always encourage webmasters to continue doing all of the things we recommend in our guidelines (ensuring the site is crawlable, well linked, has quality, unique content, etc.). A Sitemap doesn't replace all of those things. It simply is an additional tool for webmasters."

Sitemaps are supposed to make things easier for everybody – search engines and webmasters. As Vanessa observes: “Most site owners aren't experts on optimization - they simply want their pages indexed. Sitemaps help all site owners -- from the very small mom and pop to the very large company tell us about the pages of their site and provide input to us.”

Vanessa added that a sitemap might actually help a webmaster find problems with their site in some cases. She points out that: “If the site has pages with errors that prevent us from crawling, the pages won't appear in the index and those pages will be listed in the Crawl Errors section of webmaster tools. We may not have attempted to crawl some of these pages if they weren't in the Sitemap, so in this case, a webmaster might be alerted to problems not otherwise known.”

I asked Vanessa if future enhancements to sitemaps might include additional means of identifying and reporting issues to webmasters. She said she liked the idea and they were “always looking to provide as much information as possible to webmasters about potential issues”.

In the end, Vanessa said; “I don't see any reason for webmasters to avoid submitting Sitemaps. It enables them to give us a comprehensive view of the site and provide input to us about the site. And more information is always better.” While I can see the logic, to some extent, behind Rand’s post – namely wanting to be aware of problems.

While I am certainly not an expert SEO (disclaimer for Diggers), I don’t think the sitemap is going to somehow keep you from identifying these problems. Maybe you have to look for problems beyond: ‘is the page indexed (yes/no)’ but I just don’t buy into the concept of the sitemap as a negative for SEO in all but the wildest of exceptions.

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