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.
Browsing through my logs the other day I checked out a random visitor who landed on our Distinct SEO Web Review page. Nothing to shabby, however, the keyword used to hit the page was interesting. Our visitor used the term 'SEO Website evaluation' where we rank #11. Read the rest of this entry »
High Rankings is reporting a number of new tools and updates on Google's approach to search.
Some interesting finds include:
Google's love of PageRank
Comments on Flash
Use of Sitemaps and Webmaster's console
and finally, a new meta tag called: unavailable_after. This tag is supposed to work best for time sensitive promotions--to tell Google, 'don't spider after this date.' No word on whether that means Google will be efficient in removing it from the index....
Some interesting announcements by Google, coupled with a foray I've been having with a Dmoz editor, has brought a number of privacy questions to light regarding the internet giant. For example, Feedburner is now offering all sorts of free tools that used to be paid. This comes after the purchase of Feedburner by Google. Google also provides tons of free Webmaster tools including Analytics and Webmasters. (At the end of this article I give some tips (useful I swear) on How to Get on as a Dmoz Editor.
Google has released another metric in their Adwords console to help advertisers understand the overall size of particular keyword markets.
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=52760
A brief description here: Search Engine Journal.
This will have a positive impact on how you approach long tail markets, or in the least provide another metric to compare data.
Lately Google has done a good job reducing the value of incoming web links coming from less than stellar locations. This would include most ezine article web sites, web directories, and similar sites. Some SEO's still argue that 'high quality' or targeted directories are still a viable source to give link love. I on the other hand don't think that's the case, or in the very least, all directories are slowly becoming useless.
The response has been positive for the resources our SEO interviewees are providing. Rather than stop and give some top whatever lists on SEO, let's keep going on with the interviews adding more thoughts and opinions. Next up:
Name: Ben Cook (aka Skitzzo)
Web site you wish to have linked: www.seorefugee.com
Shameless plug about yourself: Visit our forum! It's small but our members are second to none. (I'd like to say that SEO Refugee is one of my favorite forums purely based on the number of big name SEOs who are regulars.)
Typically I don't pump other articles unless they have lasting value to the industry. I came across such an article last week pertaining to the expansion of B2b SEO (from SEWatch). Essentially, the report provides some data that suggests what many in the B2B (business to business) industry have known for a long time: potential clients are using search looking for sellers.
