Thursday, December 14, 2006

Website Sitemaps - Google, Yahoo & MSN - Sitemaps.org





Google has got together with Yahoo and MSN to come up with a cohesive system that will allow all website owners to create one website map that will work on all 3 search engines.

Website maps are basically XML, TXT or RSS files that contain all the URLs that you would like the search engines to index. Website maps do not impact on your rankings within the search engines but they do tell them what pages you would like them to index.

For example, Com.Motion has a Google website map and the pages that Google has indexed can by found by copying the following into the Google browser and clicking search - site: www.com-motionuk.com

Google, Yahoo and MSN have come up with a unique website that explains all about website map creation and this can be found at the following location www.sitemaps.org .

It explains all you have to know about website map creation and submission and is not to be missed. Further information can be found at Web Pro News (video file) who has interviewed Vanessa Fox from Google on this hot topic.

From the Sitemaps.org website

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

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