Online Marketing Blog

The good people at Ask.com pinged me this morning that Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com announced support of autodiscovery for Sitemaps today.

WebProNews published an announcement about the search engines Google and Yahoo agreeing to work on a common sitemaps standard and the launch of sitemaps.org at the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas last year.

The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. The updated Sitemap protocol has benefits for site publishers, the search engines as well as searchers. Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of sitemaps via a ping url.

I see Matt has added 3 more videos including:

Session 4: Dynamic URLs, Sitemaps and Geotargeting
Session 5: (Adds background) 301 Redirects, Content Themes, Dynamic to Static URLs and Split A/B Testing
Session 6: Supplemental Results
I think there is a lot more to learn from this than just the content of Matt’s videos. It’s also an exellent example of creating excellent content which can produce an abundance of links and traffic.

Maybe “RocketGoogle” isn’t such a great name. Since these are really the opinions of Matt Cutts and not Google per se, then maybe RocketMatt? Or MattBoom?¬† Oh, and be sure to note the disclaimer.

Google has pointed to the Google Sitemaps blog and the Vanessa Fox anouncement of several new Sitemaps features including:

• Increased crawl errors
• Expanded query stats
• Increased number of common words
• Increased limit of sites and Sitemaps that can be added to an account
• robots.txt analysis tool addition
• Feedback tool ‘

The theme is pretty much, “more” of everything. More is good, right?

Over time I plan on adding more scheduled topics and features to Online Marketing Blog. The most recent has been the “Spotlight on Search” series of interviews. The newest is, “TopRank Basic SEO Tips” which will cover fundamental how-to’s on search engine optimization. The SEO tips topics will be motivated by client and prospect questions that our team answers daily.

So on to the first TopRank Basic SEO Tip: Let the Spider Crawl