Google, Yahoo & MicroSoft to Cooperate on Sitemaps
I was delighted today that the Google and Yahoo search engines announced at PubCon that they would jointly support and collaborate upon one protocol for webmasters to use for submitting their site URLs for potential inclusion. View the video of the announcement here. MicroSoft has also apparently agreed to use the same protocol as well.
To support this initiative, they will jointly support sitemaps.org. If you recall, “sitemaps” was the product name that Google had been using, and which became deprecated just a few months ago in favor of “Google Webmaster Tools”. Obviously, the wheels had already begun turning to repurpose the “Sitemaps” brand name into a jointly-operated service.
Now when Sitemaps are generated to follow the common protocol, webmasters will still need to submit the link feeds to each of the SEs via their existing managment tools such as in Google Webmaster Tools and in Yahoo! Site Explorer.
If you recall, I was one of a number of webmasters out there who had requested that they collaborate on a common protocol, such as in a blog post I wrote back in September:
“Hopefully each of the major search engines will try to employ identical or compatible formats for site URLs, because it will be a hassle to have to keep up with multiple formats. This is an area where the SEs really ought to cooperate with one another for “pro bono publicoâ€? – for the common good. Currently, Yahoo seems to be just defensively immitating Google in this arena, and no one’s showing signs of collaborating.”
Kudos to Google and Yahoo for overcoming traditional corporate competitiveness to do something that mutually benefits website owners as well as the search engines!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/16/2006
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Filed under: Google, MSN Search, Tools, Yahoo Google, msn, Site-Explorer, site-submission, Sitemaps, Yahoo
New WordPress Plugin for SEO
I’ve just released “SEO Title Tag”, a plugin for WordPress. As the name implies, it allows you to optimize your WordPress site’s title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation. For example:
- If you define a custom field (called “title_tag”) when writing or editing a post (or static page), that custom field will then be displayed as the title tag.
- The post title and blog name are reversed for better keyword prominence within the title tag.
- You can shorten or eliminate the blog name altogether from your title tags.
- You can define a custom title tag for your home page through the Options page.
- It will use the category’s description as the title on category pages (when defined).
- If you’re using the UltimateTagWarrior plugin, it will put the tag name in the titles on tag pages.
- It will also cook you dinner and all sorts of other amazing, useful stuff (not really).
Get the plugin now: SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin
I’d love your feedback, as this is my first WordPress plugin.
Enjoy!
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 07/14/2006
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Filed under: HTML Optimization, Tools Blog Optimization, blogging, page-titles, plugin, plugins, SEO, title-tags, WordPress
Google Sitemaps Reveal Some of the Black Box
I earlier mentioned the recent Sitemaps upgrades which were announced in June, and how I thought these were useful for webmasters. But, the Sitemaps tools may also be useful in other ways beyond the obvious/intended ones.
The information that Google has made available in Sitemaps is providing a cool bit of intel on yet another one of the 200+ parameters or “signals” that they’re using to rank pages for SERPs.
For reference, check out the Page Analysis Statistics that are provided in Sitemaps for my “Acme” products and services experimental site:
It seems unlikely to me that these stats on “Common Words” found “In your site’s content” were generated just for the sake of providing nice tools for us in Sitemaps. No, the more likely scenario would seem to be that Google was already collating the most-common words found on your site for their own uses, and then they later chose to provide some of these stats to us in Sitemaps.
This is significant, because we’ve already known that Google tracks keyword content for each page in order to assess its relevancy for search queries made with that term. But, why would Google be tracking your most-common keywords in a site-wide context?
One good explanation presents itself: Google might be tracking common terms used throughout a site in order to assess if that site should be considered authoritative for particular keywords or thematic categories.
Early on, algorithmic researchers such as Jon Kleinberg worked on methods by which “authoritative” sites and “hubs” could be identified. IBM and others did further research on authority/hub identification, and I heard engineers from Teoma speak on the importance of these approaches a few times at SES conferences when explaining the ExpertRank system their algorithms were based upon.
So, it’s not all that surprising that Google may be trying to use commonly-occuring text to help identify Authoritative sites for various themes. This would be one good automated method for classifying sites for subject matter categories and keywords.
The take-away concept is that Google may be using words found in the visible text throughout your site to assess whether you’re authoritative for particular themes or not.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/11/2006
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Filed under: Google, Tools Algorithms, Authoritative-Hubs, ExpertRank, Google, Hubs, Keyword-Classification, On-Page-Factors, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Sitemaps
How much is a text link ad worth?
Text-Link-Ads.com recently came out with a link calculator to help you estimate the value of a text link advertisement on a publisher’s website.
Just supply the URL to the site and a couple of other bits of information and it will tell you a ballpark price for a link on that page if that site were selling links.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 07/07/2006
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Filed under: Link Building, Tools link-calculator, text-link-ads, text-link-ads.com, text-links
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.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 06/26/2006
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Filed under: Google, Tools Google, Google-Sitemaps, google-webmaster-tools, SEO
How much traffic does the top keyword position garner on Google?
Have you ever wondered how much traffic the top keyword position on Google can bring a site, for a hotly-contested term? Or, how much traffic does the top slot get you, compared with the second slot?
Most of the major SEOs and top companies keep such figures as closely-guarded secrets. Even the search engines keep the numbers of searches by various keywords secret, using various techniques to hide actual values.
The much-touted Eye Tracking Study conducted by Enquiro and Did-It show that the first listings on Google SERPs are looked at and clicked upon the most by users. Most pros already concluded this through common sense, but it’s difficult to get actual traffic amounts associated with the rankings of listings on SERPs.
I’m going to change this situation right here, right now, thanks to new data that Google has graciously begun providing to the public, and thanks to a brief reshuffling of rankings on a top keyword for one of the sites that I manage. Read on, and I’ll elaborate.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/31/2006
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Filed under: Google, Keyword Research, Market Data, Tools, Tracking and Reporting Google, Google-Trends, Keyword-Analysis, Keyword-Positions, Keyword-Rankings, Top-Position
Google Releases New Related Links Feature
Google Labs has just released a new feature called Google Related Links which allows webmasters to place a little tabbed user-interface navigation box on their site. The box will pull in links to sites related to the content on your webpage, allowing you to display related links to Searches, News, and Web Pages.
I’ve copied a screengrab below so that you can see how the real thing looks:
Perhaps this is a useful feature for some, but I’m thinking that most web editors prefer to choose their own related links and are better able to choose appropriate ones than this automated option.
So, are there other incentives to adding the code?
Their FAQ states that they do not pay publishers for adding the feature “at this time”. This would seem to hint that they’re considering paying for the referral traffic, which I think that most publishers would agree that they should.
A question: will Google bias the links supplied by this application towards searches which have better pay-for-performance ad revenue for themselves?
There’s something just a hair insidious seeming about this as well, however. On the PR face of it, Google represents that they want to help people out, make life easier, and enable people to find what they want to find on the web. But, Google is integrating itself more and more deeply into people’s websites, increasing dependency upon them. They provide search services for sites already, they’ve launched applications to allow people to design webpages through them, and they’re providing people with free web usage reporting and maps.
If there’s one thing that people have learned within the IT disaster recovery industry, placing too much dependency upon a single entity will create a single point of failure in a system. Admittedly, Google has nice infrastructure, but have you ever seen a company yet that never had a technical failure of some sort? What happens as increasing amounts of the internet itself is supported by Google, rather than by distributed systems?
In any case, it will be interesting to watch how many sites adopt this new feature without monetary incentives to do so.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/05/2006
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Filed under: Dynamic Sites, General, Google, Research and Development, Tools
Looking up historical PageRank scores
Ever wonder how your home page’s Google PageRank score has changed over the past couple years in comparison to your competitors? There’s a way to go back in time and check, assuming you’ve been listed in the Google Directory for a while. Just use the Wayback Machine and dig up archived versions of your category page in the Google Directory. For example, if your site is listed under Shopping: General Merchandise: Major Retailers, simply type into the Wayback Machine the URL “directory.google.com/ Top/Shopping/General_Merchandise/Major_Retailers/” (view the archives of this page here). This isn’t just useful for checking the actual PageRank scores. Since the sites listed on the Google Directory are sorted by PageRank score, you can also review your movement relative to the other sites in your category for smaller incremental PageRank changes. For example, did your site climb to the 5th position in that category even though your integer score didn’t change?
Don’t rely on the Internet Archive to capture these Google Directory pages with any sort of regularity. Going into the future, you should ideally be monitoring and recording the PageRank scores of you and your competitors on a regular basis.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 07/24/2004
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