Archives Tag: Google Sitemaps
[Google's] Best Pratices for Your Sitemap
I was browsing through Google’s sitemap.xml file [4mb], which by the way is quite interesting to ponder at if you’re ever bored, and something caught my eye. Google has listed images in their sitemap file. Why you might ask? For image search traffic, just like any other site. Let’s take a look at what Google [...]
Full StoryHow Google Uses Sitemaps
So everyone goes around talking about Google Sitemaps, but have you ever stopped to ask yourself how Google uses sitemaps on its own properties? Taking another look at the google.com robots.txt file, you can see this in the footer, Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml. After viewing that file, you can see that this file specifies a number of [...]
Full StoryGoogle Sitemaps to show How Many URLs Submitted
It seems that the Webmaster team either slipped in this update or I just haven’t noticed it. Webmasters can see how many URLs they are submitted for each sitemap now directly from the webmaster center. This isn’t a revolutionary update and maybe that’s why it wasn’t worth announcing, but it use useful. It’s much easier to compare what Google is actually indexing and see how many
Full StoryGoogle’s Creepy Crawlers are Back
As I reported back in December 2006, Google’s crawlers weren’t being very crawly at all. Things have changed quite drastically from that point. This is the same site that I discussed in my previous article on the crawl rates. Comparing the two charts, you can visibly see that the crawl rates in December of the site were down to only 600 pages per day being crawled.
Full StoryShowing Some Googlebot Love
Last July I wrote about how I noticed that Google’s crawl rates dramatically dropped off one of my sites. Here is an update on how that is doing. Reporting that Googlebot is well…being a little more than efficient with crawling my site. Using almost 100mb per day now. On a site that has roughly 9,500 pages, Googlebot is crawling roughly 3,000 pages per day for new content. Sitemaps actually work, believe it or not.
Full StoryDriving Traffic to Your Maps Using a Sitemap
Google is highly recommending that if you want your Maps API pages to be included into the index for search that you put them in your sitemap. Here some examples and documentation on how to write the sitemap.xml file according to the KML files for Google Earth.
Full StoryDropping Crawl Rates
As I was looking through my sitemaps profile this morning, I checked out one of my domains and noticed something very odd. Looking at the image above, you notice my crawl rates are high, high, high, and then suddenly they just dropped out of no where. With a maximum of almost 6,000 pages a day being crawled to down to not even 600 pages per day being
Full StorySitemaps become universal
Google independently created sitemaps.org in an effort to universalize the sitemap usage among search engines. MSN and Yahoo! have taken to this and going to start supporting it. Fourth place search engine Ask.com is not taking part in the standards process. Ask.com does not currently accept site maps submissions from webmasters. I’m taking it that Ask.com doesn’t like us very much and doesn’t want to be very interactive. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN on the other hand, do want to be interactive and want to take feedback we can provide. It takes a pro-active webmaster to be successful. eWeek
Full StoryWebmaster Central Has Some New Tools
There are some sweet new tools in the webmaster overview area. Specifically in the sitemaps department. Some of the new tools are the Crawl Rate (as seen below) and the Enhanced Image Search options. Just yet another great tool to communicate to webmaters how often GoogleBot is crawling around. The interaction between Google Search and the webmaster is becoming more efficient.
Full StoryQuery Stats to Update Every Monday
Vanessa Fox writes about how the Google Webmaster Central hotspot will update sitemap stats every Monday now (instead of it being randon and no one really knowing when it updates.) This is very good for us webmasters so we know exactly when stats are updating and how fresh the data is. I know I use my sitemaps quite often to see how I’m ranking. It saves time and effort.
Full StorySelecting Your Preferred Domain: www vs. non-www
Google Webmaster Tools (formerly Sitemaps) is now offering an additional tool which will tell Google what your preferred domain name is. Some people will link to domain.com and some people will link to www.domain.com. Some people prefer to send you to one or the other and there is an easy way to do this via a 301 redirect. I do it on most of my sites so that way PageRank is not lost anywhere. Now you can easily tell Google what you actually do prefer. Take a look at the help center for more details.
Full StoryGoogle Sitemaps Renamed to Google Webmaster Tools
Google Sitemaps has officially changed their name to Google Webmaster Tools in an effort to better communicate what the tool has to offer to webmasters. The sitemaps have really become a good tool for webmasters and now they want to make that very apparent to everyone. They have a new blog as well instead of sitemaps.blogspot.com. (via)
Full StorySitemaps Forces Verification
Google Sitemaps is slowly going to making the rounds to all sites listed in Sitemaps and making sure they are still verified. Very soon, we’ll be doing one of our periodic checks of verified sites. As our documentation notes, we do this to make sure that the verification HTML file or meta tag still exists. If we don’t find the file or tag during this check, the
Full StoryGoogle Sitemaps Facelifted
Google Sitemaps has been an incredible tool for webmasters and I thoroughly enjoy the feature available to us. Today I noticed that there were some cosmetic updates to it. Some new check marks, some prettier colors, just an overall better look to it. They added, to what I noticed, some easier navigation to be able to see what GoogleBot is actually doing. This is helpful so GoogleBot and I can hang out more and get to know each other better. The more I offer, through sitemaps, the better GoogleBot knows my site and now GoogleBot can really talk straight back to me through this tool.
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