'Net Features : sitemaps

Bing Sitemap Plugin Accommodates Webmasters

Michael Garrity — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:45:00 GMT

Last week was a big one for Bing. The Mircosoft-owned search engine announced a substantial update that consisted primarily of three major changes.

Two of these refinements are distinctly user-centric, as they provide a new tile-based image search layout (similar to the interface of Windows 8 and Windows Phone devices) that comes with revamped “Friends Photo Search” functionality, as well. The other change consists of a series of autosuggest enhancements meant to improve the search experience for users by making autosuggestions faster and more intuitive with the addition of “ghosting” features, which include complimentary text where a user is typing that is already highlighted, so that searchers can either accept the suggestion or keep typing to have the ghosting text change based on additional information.

However, the third Bing update was made with webmasters in mind; it is a plugin that makes it considerably easier to create an XML sitemaps to submit to the search engine. This tool will be especially useful for those website owners that aren’t using a content management system (CMS) to develop XML sitemaps.

As you probably know, XML sitemaps allow webmasters to give search engines a comprehensive and, most importantly, accurate representation of their websites, thus letting them control what the search engines will index, at least in terms of priority. Webmasters can even inform Bing of new or updated content on their sites.

There are many benefits to utilizing sitemaps, the most obvious of which is that users will always have a full, updated list of all of the URLs on their site, plus a list of all the URLs that were recently modified. This makes it much easier for a search engine’s crawlers to prioritize all of a website’s various URLS, which will help keep bot traffic bandwidth down.

Bing’s Sitemap Plugin, which is an open source project that was made available through an Apache license, is compliant with sitemaps.org and runs on Microsoft IIS servers, as well as Linux/UNIX servers that run Apache. It can create two different types of sitemaps: The first is a comprehensive sitemap of all the URLs seen in server traffic, and the other is a sitemap that’s dedicated to storing URLs that have recently changed. Furthermore, the plugin doesn’t just generate a list of URLs; it also adds <lastmod> and <priority> tags and values to a sitemap based on a page’s popularity.

But among the most important aspects of the sitemap plugin is the amount of control that it gives to users. Webmasters that use the Bing plugin to create their sitemaps will be able to control exactly what gets added to it, and the plugin will be able to detect any Disallow and Allow directives inside a site’s robot.txt, thus allowing it to skip any URL patterns that shouldn’t be added. In addition, it provides greater control through various configuration files with rules that will augment pre-existing robots.txt Disallow directives, and webmasters will be given total control over selecting those query parameters that the plugin should honor and include in added URLS.

The Bing Sitemap Plugin can be configured to operate in four different site and server scenarios: 1. Single site on a single server, 2. Single site on multiple servers, 3. Multiple sites on a single server or 4. Multiple sites on multiple servers. When the plugin operates across multiple servers, it enables a merge process that generates a single, unified sitemap that can be distributed across all of them.

With the addition of the Bing Sitemap Plugin, the search engine has taken another step toward becoming more webmaster-friendly, which will be important if it ever hopes to take away market share from Google. What do you think about the new plugin? Will it convince you to focus more on optimizing your website specifically for Bing? Let us know in the comments.

WM Radio: Crowd-sourced Couponing, Reader Questions Answered

Mike Phillips — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:30:00 GMT

Crowd-sourced couponing is hot. Groupon.com ushered in the era but there are alternatives with new business models. We speak with the Founder of KnowtoriousDeals.com about their new website. Also, we answer a user question about sitemaps and another about the proliferation of WordPress and other CMS-style sites.

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If you would like to have your questions answered on Website Magazine Radio, please send email to mike@websitemagazine.com with "WM Radio" in the subject field.

Hostway Integrates Automatic Sitemap Tool

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:44:00 GMT

Web hosting provider Hostway will begin rolling out a feature which lets its 1.5 million customers develop sitemaps and submit them directly to major search engines.

Through an integration with AutomaticSiteMaps, Hostway is enabling its customers to ensure that Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com have up-to-date, page-by-page information about their site. Hostway is the first Web hosting provider to integrate this new direct XML Sitemap submission technology. Hostway customers will be able to manage their AutomaticSiteMap service (including optional expanded service levels) from within their Web hosting control panel.

“This is the only system we found that can handle Web site submission on a massive scale to boost search engine rankings for all our customers. AutomaticSiteMap is an exact fit with the other technologies and services we provide to help our customers make more money online,” said John Lee, Hostway's senior vice president of small business hosting. “AutomaticSiteMap's turnkey system is directly integrated into our control panel and automatically delivered to our customers so that they can increase search traffic without taking any additional action."

While it's certainly neccessary to submit you sitemap to the search engines, I worry that should a customer change their hosting company they might lose access to their sitemap (especially since the system is "directly integrated" with Hostway's control panel). Perhaps someone from either company will clarify.

Google Sitemap FAQ Redux

Administrator — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:31:00 GMT

Google has a produced a nice run down of some common questions about Google Sitemaps. It's a very lengthy post but an important one and as such I've done a redux of the key points to understand.

Sitemaps help Google discover all pages on your site, but does not guarantee crawling or indexing
Sitemaps help Google discover information about your pages; when they were updated and their relative importance
Sitemaps do not influence rankings, but can increase Google's awareness of pages which can lead to increased presence and visibility in the index.
Setting the "priority" of all pages to "1.0" does not impact the ranking of pages, nor does the placement of URLs in a sitemap
Penalties occuring after a sitemap submission are purely coincidental
Sitemaps can be located anywhere as long as the site where the sitemap is located and the site whose URL are referenced are verifed in Webmaster Central
Sitemaps need to be developed in the supported formats (syndication feeds, e.g. RSS or Atom, and Text files using the Sitemap protocol) and not in HTML. Google recommends the XML sitemap protocol
Sitemaps can be used to indicate preferred URL for pages which contain the same content.

Related Posts on "Sitemaps" at Website Magazine:

So you want a Sitemap
The SEO Advantage of a Sitemap
Google Video Sitemap Generator Tool
Total Support for Sitemaps
Include a Sitemap, Get on Yahoo Site Explorer