The major search engines have recently united around a common "sitemaps" standard to provide them with bulk URL submissions. This session looks at how sitemaps works, along with other submission options.

Priyank Garg

• Yahoo- Sitemaps
• XML Schema and a protocol to publish you sites urls to search crawlers
• Adopted by all major engines
• Sitemaps are expected to be valid XML
• All URLS must be entity escaped
• Sitemaps can take 50,000 urls each
• You can point to RSS feeds from your XML file
• How do you get a sitemap to engine—-
  • Auto discovery of sitemaps via robots.txt (yahoo, Ask is joining as well)
  • A new robots directive called "sitemap"
• Yahoo Site explorer out of beta
• you can track multiple sites in Yahoo explorer
• Site explorer now accepts mobile files
• Authentication via key file or meta tags
• Report Spam Inlinks -Automate the reporting of spam

Maile Ohya

• Maximize exposure to search engines
• More crawled content
• Commonly formatted as TXT, RSS/ATOM as well as XML
• One of the primary reason for using sitemaps is helps Google (engines) improve index freshness, increase efficiency
• Google News Sitemaps recently released in Beta
• 2 ways of entering search ranking …WWW and Sitemaps
• Always include the the URLS full path
• The protocol and hostname od the the listed URLS must match the sitemaps location
• Syndication Feed Sitemap
• Google Sitemap generator …Similar to Python
• Autodiscovery with with Sitemaps.org

Vivek Pathic

• Moving into another stage now that they have added the ability to submit sitemaps

Nathan Buggia

• Excited that all the major search engines have come together with sitemaps
• Should help innovation and competition

Eric Papczun

• How can we make the sitemaps tool actionable/how can you compare and contrast to other sites?
  • Sitemaps usually picked up in one or two days
  • Crawl within a week or two
  • Small sites with low PageRank take longer
• Don’t forget about the importance of a native sitemap
• Make sure that redundant content is excluded
• Use preferred domain tool to tell Google if you want www.domain.com or domain.com
• Sitemaps have forced people think about URL management
• Use tool to reduce redundancies
• Link Report, New Feature

Todd Friesen

• Search Submit Pro

Tags: Search Engines, Search Engine Strategies, SES, SES NYC, Danny Sullivan, Eric Papczun, Performics, Todd Friesen, Range Online Media, Priyank Garg, Yahoo Search, Maile Ohye, Google, Vivek Pathak, Ask, Nathan Buggie, Live Search, MSN