July 7, 2005 Archives

I have been searching the forums for a solid, positive sign, brought from implementing Google Sitemaps for a site that is already fully indexed. Member Relevancy at Search Engine Watch Forums posted a response stating;

Something else that appears to be cool with Google sitemaps is tht it appears to take pages out of the supplemental results. I just recently added a sitemap for one of my sites that was fully in the supp index and a few days later half the pages got taken out.

Now, sites within the supplemental indexed are arguably not fully indexed. But I know tons of developers have issues getting these sites out of that index. If it is as simple as feeding Google a Sitemaps file, then it might be worth the effort.

Many of you are aware of the terrible London Bombings, where MSNBC reports 40 dead so far. Danny Sullivan set up a News Sources On London Bombings at the SEW Blog. In addition, many of the SEO Forums have support threads on this terrible terrorist attack; including Cre8asite Forums, WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

But a new thread in the WebmasterWorld AdSense forum came about due to this news, Does Al Kaida ruin impressions and EPC? In this thread AdSense publishers are reporting lower impressions, lower EPC and lower CPM but average CTR. Most believe its due to this attack. The global affect of a terrorist attack.

I hope it doesn't insult anyone to have posted on this sensitive topic with a SEM twist. That was not my intention and I hope the numbers of deaths and injuries do not rise.

DigitalPoint forum thread named getting listed on Yahoo in 24 hours argues that by adding an RSS feed to your site and ensuring Yahoo knows about that feed, will in fact get you indexed more quickly. Of course this is disputed and there is no scientific proof of this as of yet.

In the context of tagging, RSS is an invaluable SEO tool. But outside of that, it does clearly help with site visibility. Black arrow is the Yahoo! Directory listing for this site, the blue arrow is the RSS listing for this site and the green arrow (box) is the My Web tagging I have done for this site. All of this increases the visibility of ones listing in the SERPs.

A thread at HighRankings forum named MSN Showing Meta Keywords in description shows a few examples of this. The first example is the number one result for print server. The description snippet on the SERPs read; "... print server,jet direct print server,what is a print server,wireless print server,used print server,2 port usb print server,dlink print server,usb print server,usb wireless print server,usb print ..." But take a look at the source code of the result page.

<title>Print Server Software for Windows Platforms</title>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Print Server software allowing manipulation of print stream and Print to File options.">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="print server,Print Server,printer server,wireless...

This is not a global issue nor is it an isolated issue.

Almost all Webmasters have experienced the Teoma Crawler that crawls too much. What I mean by too much, is that the bandwidth usage of Ask Jeeves sometimes can spike uncontrollably. There are threads all over the place about this. The most recent thread I found is at DigitalPoint forums and is named Ask Jeeves hitting thousands of pages on a 12 page site...

So what can you do? Here are just a few?

(1) Exclude the image directories from these crawlers. Unless you want to rank well for image searches, there is no real reason to have the spiders crawl your large images.

(2) The Teoma crawler supports the Crawl-Delay, you can set a crawl delay for that spider. More information at Teoma Tech Information page.

(3) Then of course you can do the caching stuff and compression stuff on the server side.

A thread at WebmasterWorld asks Yahoo & Grammar: Does Yahoo Detect Proper Grammar?

A member says that he took over a client's Web site from an other SEO. He noticed that the client's ranking in Yahoo dropped. He also noticed that the content in the title tags are not grammatically correct. If you put one and one together, it can imply that your rankings will tank in Yahoo if your title tag is not in proper English.

But that is absolutely wrong. Most title tags don't read 100% grammatically correct, some times on purpose. It is important it reads quickly and catchy and sometimes that means you need to put grammar on the back burner.