Friday, May 1, 2009

Release Of Search and Sitemap Study Is A Gold Mine

In the world of niche marketing we are always looking for information to help understand how search engines work. I always say go strait to the source. Google and sometimes Yahoo. Most webmasters would agree Google is king.
Google has provided one of the most important papers or study we have see in sometime. Its called, Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty by Uri Shonfeld. Uri presented his summer internship work studying Sitemaps from a coverage and freshness perspective. He presented the study at at the WWW'09 conference in Madrid Spain.
This study clearly shows how search engines follow site maps and other links on a site. It is so in depth every Web Master will learn something.
Search Engines are looking for certain things within a website and Niche Store Builders need to give it to them. Keeping websites fresh is a important part of this.
Search Engines need more than just being feed keywords these days. SE's are looking for fresh relevant content that is constantly changing and being updated.
If we look at the trends we all see social networking taking over. For example MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. These site are showing up in my stats more and more as backlinks. This tells us SE's are putting priority on these sites that update with fresh content constantly.
By setting up sitemaps and robot.txt files properly we can increase traffic and conversion should increase aswell.
After you read Uri's work you will have new perspective of how search engines work and how sitemaps influence them.
Google Webmasters Blog LINK