3 giants are united by report Sitemaps

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support the Sitemap 1.0 protocol. How can this new standard help you to improve the ranking of your web site in search engines?

What are sitemaps and what is the Sitemaps protocol?

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
- how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site

This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site.

The Sitemaps 1.0 protocol is a new standard that will make it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

How can you benefit from this new standard?

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.

The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your web site. Depending on how your web site is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.

Does using the Sitemaps 1.0 protocol improve your search engine rankings?

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

A sitemap helps search engines to find your web pages but it does not help you to get higher search engine rankings. High rankings on search engines are the result of good inbound links and optimized web page content.

If your web pages have both, then search engines will give them high rankings.

The new sitemaps protocol can help you to inform search engines about your web pages. Further information about the new sitemaps standard can be found on the official sitemaps web site.

Latest fashion, designers, Design Magazine, Shows. Fashion styles, modeling, history. Fashion News and games

Dynamically created pages (New way)

Dynamically created web pages often cause problems with search engines. If your web pages are dynamically created, it's likely that many search engines have difficulty to index them.

Why have search engines problems with dynamically created pages?

Many search engines don't like dynamically created pages because they might get in an infinite loop if they follow some dynamically created pages.

Google has an official statement about this in its webmaster guidelines:

"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."

What did Google change?

Google had the following statement in its webmaster guidelines:

"Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

This entry has been removed from Google's guidelines. Here's the official statement from Google's blog:

"Google now indexes URLs that contain this parameter ("&id="). So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it - we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you.

If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

What does this mean to your web site?

If you have a dynamically created web site that uses only one or two parameters to create web pages then it's likely that Google can index your web pages without problems.

If you use more parameters then you should rewrite your URLs. Rewriting your URLs makes sure that most search engines will be able to index your site.

If you cannot rewrite your URLs then it helps if at least one stable link points to a dynamically created page. If a web page can be found through a direct link then it is more likely that search engines index that page.

Google's -#30 penalty

Webmasters in online forums have discovered a new Google filter that Google uses to downrank web sites in its result pages. Has this filter been applied to your web site? How can you avoid that Google applies that filter to your site?

What is Google's -30 filter?

The -30 filter is a penalty that Google applies to web sites that use spammy SEO techniques. If Google applies the penalty to a web site, the rankings of that site are downgraded by 30 positions.

Many webmasters in online forums reported that they had top rankings on Google and now they cannot get beyond position 31 in Google. Some webmasters even have #31 rankings for all of their keywords on Google.

Why does Google apply the -30 filter to some web sites?

It seems that Google applies the -30 filter to web sites that use certain spamming techniques. It seems that the following techniques trigger the -30 filter on Google:

1. Guestbook spamming

If you try to get inbound links by spamming guestbooks and blogs then Google might apply the filter to your web site.

2. JavaScript redirects

JavaScript redirections might be misinterpreted as a spamming attempt. Better use 301 htaccess redirect if you must redirect URLs on your pages.

3. Doorway pages

Google doesn't like doorway pages. If you must use special landing pages for PPC ads and other ads, make sure that these pages cannot be spidered by Google and other search engines. You can use robots.txt to do that.

What can you do if Google applies the -30 filter to your site?

First of all, you should remove the spam elements from your web site. If you use JavaScript redirects or doorway pages, remove them from your site.

The -30 filter seems to be an automated filter. If you remove the spam factors from your site then you'll probably get your rankings back after some time. You can also send a reinclusion request to Google.

If nothing helps, then the only way to get reincluded in Google is to get a new domain name.

Google doesn't like spammers. If you want lasting results then you should focus on ethical search engine optimization methods.