Google has removed their supplemental index which should mean more pages in the general index which equals more overall traffic for your web site. Before, Google used the supplemental index to classify web pages that did not have enough mustards (links) and/or content (duplicate) to meet he standards of the main Google index.

Google had this to say:

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we've been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we've decided to stop labeling these URLs as "Supplemental Results." Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google's supplemental index being deeper and fresher.

There were pros and cons to the system. Well now it has been removed, which brings to light another set of pros and cons.

Pros and Cons of Removing the Google Supplemental Index

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Yahoo, Google, and now MSN Join for Auto Discovery

All three major search engines now support an auto-discovery feature for sitemaps located in your robots.txt file. You can now put the following code:

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

into your robots.txt (on its own line) file and all the search engines will capture your xml sitemap.

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Well it finally happened. I dunno how it works, where they got my name and number, but I should have known that when I received a call today with 'unknown' in the display it was going to be spam. Spam on the phone you say?

Cold Calling for Web Hosting and Web Design is Phone Spam

A+ hosting (I can't be sure it was them so I won't list their web site) called me today and inquired whether I had taken care of some 'recent web hosting woes'. I don't recall asking anybody for help in my web hosting but hey, maybe that was the one liner.

What really got me was once I said I had no use for web hosting the conversation proceeded to, 'can we offer you a service to increase your web rankings?'. My response, 'no, I do web marketing myself.'

BUDDY, A+ Web Hosting, PLEASE! Do your damn homework at least. I should have rambled on and on to waste their time, but seriously, did you check the web site? Does it look like your web hosting/ web design/ web seo/ web marketing company can help me? Ha, uh no. Next time I get a call like this I'm going to set up a pitched squeal device that will render the cold call perpetrator listless and the company bankrupt. I swear it's in the making....

Remove and Reinclude Web Pages

Google Webmaster Tool console has been updated (or added to) yet again. This time you can remove content from your page that you don't want kicking around and have found robots.txt is not successful at eliminating. Conversely, you can also use the new tool in the console to re-include a web page that's been canned.

For more information on the tool visit the Google Webmasters blog.

It appears that Google, along with the other major online search engines, have combined to change the way they view sitemaps. Before you could submit to each major engine with a location (usually .xml) of your sitemap file and they would crawl it. It appears there is an even better way.

Robots.txt Used to Locate Sitemap

Now you can place a line of text in your robots file so all spiders (who understand what to look for) will be able to locate your sitemap file easily. This is how your new entry in the robots.txt file should look like:

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

You can still submit to the search engine webmaster consoles directly, however, this is a one stop solution to help the spiders find what they need. Of course, this also implies that you use sitemap.xml files to start with. Many SEOs are now advocating that you bypass the whole 'add sitemap' because you loose certain information like where your weaker pages (PR wise) are.

More of the news here:

Technorati Tags: sitemaps, site map xml, sitemaps robots.txt, sitemap robots, sitemap protocol, google sitemap

Yahoo! reveals it will dump its directory results from individual search pages

Are the days of you blowing 300USD on a year long link in the Yahoo! directory gone? I have never been one to submit to the Yahoo! directory but many SEOs swear by it. Well it appears the days of the glorified linking repository may soon be over. It appears that slowly but surely Yahoo! is phasing out their directory. More information posted in this thread at SER.

SEM Scholarship Launches

Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim has emerged to offer the annual contest for the best article in web marketing. I'm all for it and even thought about submitting, I mean why not, the prizes are worth $10,000!

But really, the whole contest is quite clever. Marketing Pilgrim gets lots of cool articles and one person gets $10,000 of prizes--not cash remember--prizes. Most of them are things any regular SEO should already have/read so I can't really say I have that big of an incentive to give my super content out in hopes of winning....

Mind you, I will say that the one prize worthy is the one month training/coaching that Andy Beal offers. That alone is worth more than the other prizes combined so maybe I will send one in for giggles.

Yahoo Offers Webmasters Another No Directory Meta Tag

Congrats Yahoo, you finally delivered on a promise made six months ago. Yahoo has supported the NOODP tag for a while, but FINALLY they will support a similar tag for their own directory.

To bring you up to speed, NOODP meta tags prevent Google or Yahoo from using their (Dmoz) descriptions in your SERP results. If your search results have the directory description you can tell the search spiders to discard the directory meta in favour of your own on page meta description tag.

Like I said, Yahoo has finally said they will respect a 'no directory' tag, however, they did so in a manner that will force all webmasters to add tags to their code. Yahoo have developed their own unique meta tag that permits permits webmasters to discard Yahoo! directory descriptions and/or Open Directory descriptions. You will add the following:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOYDIR" />
OR
<meta name="Slurp" content="NOYDIR" />

There's not point of using the first one since no other bots respect NOYDIR so use the second one. Yahoo! already respects the NOODP tag (which prevents the DMOZ description) and have now finally have added the Yahoo! directory support.

Technorati Tags: yahoo noydir, yahoo noodp, yahoo no directory, no directory yahoo meta