Online Marketing Trends » Google SiteMaps

Use Robots.txt to publish your SiteMap to the world

Dave Verzijl — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:23:21 +0000

You can now point spiders to your sitemap from your robots.txt.

Just add this to the robots.txt:

Sitemap:

See http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_robots

Image Search is the feature

Dave Verzijl — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:18:48 +0000

As you might know I run a shop in wich I am selling my collection of Madonna merchandise and rare items. I am implementing several techniques to increase results from search engines. What surprises me is that Google Image Search brings a lot of traffic to my site, even more than Google ‘regular’ search.

In the overview below you see a list of visits from sites that link to Madonna shop. You’ll see that only search engines and Wikipedia are part of the top 10. This is because my Link Partner network still has to be expanded and is less easy than getting traffic from search engines.

http://images.google.com/

290

13,73%

Since I enabled the option Enhanced Image Search in Google Webmaster Tools, traffic from Google Image Search has increased and now go beyond the amount of traffic from regular Google results. This means that there is a lot of search traffic waiting for you.

So if you sell products, make sure the name of your product images are constructed correctly and that you assigned an alt-tag with descriptive information.

Google Webmaster Tools shows links (to links)

Dave Verzijl — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 11:55:43 +0000

When inserting the results of our new Google SiteMaps MCMS add-on to my Google Webmaster Tools account, I noticed a very handy new feature. Google now shows the internal links of your website and the external links pointing to your site.

Yesterday we implemented a new functionality for our MCMS 2002 framework; a Google SiteMaps extension which generates a Google SiteMap containing the channel structure of the website. I then ofcourse added the SiteMap to Google Webmaster Tools and I noticed this new piece of information.

As you can see in the screenshot, our site contains a page containing the vacancy “Web Analist”. The URL is:

http://www.tamtam.nl/www/NL/Tam_Tam/Vacatures/Web_Analist.htm

In this screenshot you see that several external sites link to our vacancy.

One Sitemap protocol for Google/Yahoo/Microsoft

Dave Verzijl — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:00:24 +0000

There is some news from Google Sitemaps. I think sites that utilize Google Sitemaps will benefit over sites that are not. Especially in the long run as using XML Sitemaps will decrease time needed to crawl your site. Start using them now!

We’re thrilled to tell you that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in supporting the Sitemap protocol.As part of this development, we’re moving the protocol to a new namespace, www.sitemaps.org, and raising the version number to 0.9. The sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the protocol and publish enhancements on the jointly-maintained site sitemaps.org.If you’ve already submitted a Sitemap to Google using the previous namespace and version number, we’ll continue to accept it. If you haven’t submitted a Sitemap before, check out the documentation on

www.sitemaps.org for information on creating one. You can submit your Sitemap file to Google using Google webmaster tools. See the documentation that Yahoo! and Microsoft provide for information about submitting to them.If any website owners, tool writers, or webserver developers haven’t gotten around to implementing Sitemaps yet, thinking this was just a crazy Google experiment, we hope this joint announcement shows that the industry is heading in this direction. The more Sitemaps eventually cover the entire web, the more we can revolutionize the way web crawlers interact with websites. In our view, the experiment is still underway.

Google SiteMaps now has Enhanced Image Search

Dave Verzijl — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 13:56:05 +0000

Google SiteMaps now features Enhanced Image Search, a new feature which makes enhanched searching for images possible. This feature uses Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

Google Image Labeler is an volunteer network for people who want to help label images found on the internet. You can sign up as guest at the Google Image Labeler website.

Another reason to start indexing your site with Google SiteMaps. I’m currently implementing this service for several customers now and their pages are being accessed more frequently due to Google SiteMaps.

Generate Google Sitemaps XML for MCMS

Dave Verzijl — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:23:20 +0000

Are you trying to create a Google Sitemaps XML file from your Microsoft Content Management Server 2002/SP1?

Then be sure to try out the sample published by Steven Mostinckx. If you don’t want to compile the code yourself, download the compiled version here: GoogleSitemaps.exe (16 KB)

It’s really easy to run this application; start a command prompt and paste:

GoogleSitemaps.exe “/channels/mysite” “c:/temp/GoogleSitemaps.xml” http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.yoursite.com/ /empty/

(the parameters are:
-startpath
-path+name xml result
-xmlns
-domain
-skipchannels)

You should have installed MCMS on your machine ofcourse.

Thanks to my colleague Jasper for the hint!