Axandra news archive: 21 November 2006

• Facts of the week
• Search engine news of the week
• Articles of the week
• Recommended resources
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Last week, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support the Sitemap 0.9 protocol. How can this new standard help you to improve the ranking of your web site in search engines?

What are sitemaps and what is the Sitemaps protocol?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL:

• when it was last updated
• how often it usually changes
• how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site

This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site.

The Sitemaps 0.9 protocol is a new standard that will make it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

How can you benefit from this new standard?

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your web site. Depending on how your web site is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.

Does using the Sitemaps 0.9 protocol improve your search engine rankings?

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

A sitemap helps search engines to find your web pages but it does not help you to get higher search engine rankings. High rankings on search engines are the result of good inbound links and optimized web page content.

If your web pages have both, then search engines will give them high rankings.

The new sitemaps protocol can help you to inform search engines about your web pages. Further information about the new sitemaps standard can be found on the official sitemaps web site.

"In October 2006, Google Sites captured 45.4 percent of the U.S. search market, gaining 0.3 share points from the previous month. Yahoo! Sites maintained its second place ranking with 28.2 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (11.7 percent), Ask Network (5.8 percent) and Time Warner Network (5.4 percent)."

Yahoo search growth beats Google

"Yahoo's share of search traffic has grown faster than Google's in the last year, according to new data from Nielsen//Netratings.

Nielsen's October U.S. search share rankings show Yahoo with 1.46B searches, up 30% from last year and representing 23.9% of all U.S. searches. Google was used for 3.02B searches, up 23% from last year. Google is responsible for 49.6% of all Internet searches.

MSN/Windows Live Search fell 8% year-over-year. IAC InterActive Corp.'s Ask.com saw search traffic jump 25%, although the search engine only accounts for 2.8% of the market."

"Dogpile.com, the search engine that combines the top results from all the leading search engines, ranked highest in overall customer satisfaction among Internet users, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2006 Residential Online Service Customer Satisfaction Study."

Search engine newslets

• Yahoo follows Google into newspaper ad deals.
• Chinese search engine Qihoo has raised US $25 million in venture capital.
• Yahoo! Maps released from beta.
• Koders benefits from Google attention.
• PCNames.com is a new domain search engine.
• Pronto.com is a new shopping search engine.
• Prank calls from Google maps.
• The race to create a 'smart' Google.

"Google has clearly figured out that the advertising market is not big enough to justify its stock market valuation. The entire U.S. advertising market is $140 billion a year – that’s less than Google’s current market cap of $151 billion."

Sticky situation at Yahoo!

"A key executive spills his guts in a corporate memo, lashing out at his company's complacency, lack of focus, and the evils of being spread too thin."

MSN goes viral in search of boost

"Microsoft is using offbeat ads to take on a market leader—in this case, Google, which has a commanding lead in the key search advertising market."

"IBP and ARELIS have made our life so much easier"

"IBP and ARELIS have made our life so much easier. We have found the IBP very useful with our online Furniture Store 14ushop.com finding keywords, submitting our site and so much more.

ARELIS has proven important in managing our links pages and keeping those pages up to date. Adding new links after checking them, has made our job simpler. We attempt to not overload our corporation with staff, multi-tasking is made easier using both IBP and ARELIS."
Jim Haverlock, www.14ushop.com

IBP & ARELIS 9.5 beta test

We're working on a new version of ARELIS and IBP. You can be among the first to test the new version.

The new version has much improved keyword management and keyword suggestion tools, as well as several minor improvements. All known bugs have been fixed in the new version.

If you're comfortable testing pre-release versions that are not intended for daily work, you should download the test version. We value your feedback on the preview version so that we can make the final release as powerful as possible.

The new version will be a free update for registered users of the current versions.

How to get top 10 rankings on Google and Yahoo!

IBP's Top 10 Web Page Optimizer and IBP's Top 10 Inbound Link Optimizer help you to get your web site to the top of the search results. Get more visitors, more customers and more sales. Ordering the full IBP version is 100% risk-free. If you don't like the full version, you'll get your money back.

Back to table of contents - Visit Axandra.com

• The effect of bad neighborhood links on your web site rankings
• Dynamically created pages and Google's new way to deal with them
• Google's -30 penalty
• Google's Sandbox and Google's TrustRank and your web site
• The right click distance can improve your search engine rankings
• How Google's latest PageRank update affects your web site
• Six reasons why search engines ignore your web pages
• How to get out of Google's supplemental results
• View all past issues...