Google-Sitemaps : Natural Search Blog

AMA Hot Topic Series: Search Marketing in San Fran

The San Francicso leg of the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Marketing this past Friday was really great! The crowd was intimate, which allowed all of us speakers to mingle and have some quality discussions with folx, and the seminar/conference/workshop was excellently organized.

Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.

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Popularity: 14% [?]

Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/25/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

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Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Conferences, Google, HTML Optimization, Keyword Research, Link Building, Marketing, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Seminars, Social Media Optimization AMA-Hot-Top-Series, AMA-Search-Engine-Marketing, American-Marketing-Association-Hot-Topic-Series-on-Sear, Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Search Engine Optimization

To Use Sitemaps, or Not To Use Sitemaps, That’s the Question

It was really great when Google launched its Sitemaps (recently renamed to Webmaster Tools, as part of their Webmaster Central utilities) - when that happened it was a really great indication of a new time where technicians who wished to help make their pages findable would not automatically be considered “evil” and the SEs might provide tools to help technicians disclose their pages directly. Yahoo soon followed with their own tools, named Yahoo! Site Explorer, and surely MSN will bow to peer pressure with their own submission system and tools.

Initially, I thought that there wasn’t significant advantage to me for using these systems, because I’d already developed good methods for providing our page links to the search engines through the natural linking found in our site navigation systems.

Why should I expend yet more time and resources to dynamically produce the link files?

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 09/19/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

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Trackback | Comments (2) | Comments RSS | Filed under: General, Google, Site Structure, Yahoo Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, Sitemaps, URL-submission, yahoo-site-explorer

Google Sitemaps upgrades help webmasters

The Google Sitemaps team just last week announced a number of changes on their blog.

I was really happy and excited that they appear to’ve done a few of the things I suggested in a post on the Google Sitemaps Group.

They did the following things I had suggested:

Expanded the numbers of top search terms and words commonly found on your site pages from max 20 to 75 (I’d still like to see more);
They added the ability to see the top search queries lists for a number of the other Google search areas, including Froogle, Google Base, Images, Maps, etc! This is really pleasing!
They removed common terms that previously appeared in these lists — “html” and “www”.

There were some additonal things they did which are also interesting:

They show ALL URLs they had trouble crawling now;
They show top query keywords that your site appears in, broken out by the web properties I mentioned above, AND broken out by country!
They’ve now provided a robots.txt tool so that the (surprisingly large number of) people who have such difficulty in forming their robots.txt files could have a resource to check their file for them.
They’ve added a three-value rating scale to each of their main features, allowing one to flag the item as “happy face”, “neutral face”, and “unhappy face”.

I’m sure other folx must’ve requested some of the same things I’d suggested, and Google’s good at providing useful features, but it’s really gratifying to see some of the changes I’d wanted showing up now!

Stay tuned for a follow-up posting from me about some of these changes. Some of these new features actually provide some great intel on parameters/methods that Google uses to rank pages.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/26/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print