sitemaps

Susan Moskwa and Trever Voucher from Google's Webmaster Tools Team published a synopsis of the questions they received at Chicago's recent Search Engine Strategies Conference. If you have ever had a question about Google Sitemaps and the effect they may or may not have on your site, this is a helpful read.Get the answers to the following questions:

The robots.txt analysis tool at Google Webmaster Central received some much-needed updating, and should be more effective for webmasters today.

Dear Kalena... I have two sites; One www.alpine-property.com is top of Google rankings for all my chosen keywords, it has no frames, daily updated content and lots of inbound links, so not surprising.

Rand Fishkin recently posted an interesting concept on his SEOmoz.org blog about sitemaps. For those of you keeping score at home, a sitemap is a document (typically xml) that sits on your server and helps search engine spiders crawl and index your site. Sounds great, right? Maybe… maybe not. Rand theorizes these sitemaps may actually be bad for your SEO efforts.

If you follow search engine news you know that the major search engines are fighting tooth and nail for market share.

An expressed desire for better indexing from Google News has prompted Google to release a Sitemaps product specifically for those news publishers.

Google has introduced sitemaps for Google News. So if you have a site included in Google News, you can creat and submit News Sitemaps to inform Google about the articles that you wish to be included in Google News.

Watch the Murdok exclusive video in which Chris Richardson interviews Tim Mayer of Yahoo and Vanessa Fox of Google. They talk about their new Sitemaps.org partnership.