Confused about XML (nee Google) Sitemaps, their purpose and the difference between the XML version and the sitemap page found on many sites? Then you should checkout the Sitemap FAQ on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.
I wasn’t going to link to this video tutorial from Google on the usefulness of image alt attributes, but once I watched it, I thought it was such a great explanation that I added it to the Resources page and am posting about it here.
Alt attributes sometimes become one of the little things that are forgotten when trying to get clients who are new to web publishing understand how to use markup effectively. This video described it much better than I ever have. Coming from a search engine, the advice will likely hold more weight while the clarity of the message is more likely to stick with clients, so I will be pointing people to this explanation from now on.
Published today was a summary of Google’s consistent policy over buying and selling links. It is worth pointing out to site owners. A frequently asked question by someone with a “big idea” and wants their site up and running on the web in two weeks with loads of search engine traffic on launch day is “Can I buy links for search engine placement?”. Of course they can, but against my recommendation. If they choose to do so, I choose to not get involved with them. Some people just see money as a short cut and understand once they read the webmaster guidelines. Others could care less about the rules, they are more interested in gaming the system and trying to get away with it. I think that effort is much better spent elsewhere.
Much of the anti-Google sentiments on the web I believe is from site owners who provide no value whatsoever, and are still trying to eke out revenue from link doping or other paid for links strategies as were employed over five years ago (Remember searching on a topic and ending up on a page full of links that had no relevance to your search in terms of actual content? See examples of today’s methods). Google is not the monopolistic dictator in this regard protecting big business/themselves as is often portrayed. There is a universal desire among all search engines to protect their indexes’ PageRank or equivalent from manipulation from paid links. I commend the search engines proactive work in this area, keeping their indexes unpolluted and user trustworthy. I feel the whole Internet becomes much less useful if the search engines were ever contaminated this way.
Google has a nice video (approximately 8 minutes) of Matt Cutts describing the anatomy of a search result on the Google Webmaster Central Blog. He not only provides information on the terminology and the different sections of a search result, but also where the information comes from, why it appears and how you can influence what is shown for your site in a result list. I think this video is valuable to search engine users as well as site owners to understand how snippets for search results are put together. Go watch the video now.
Webmaster Tools was recently updated with a new tool to allow specification of a geographic location to associate with your website. This will be useful to organizations whose sites server a specific area and do not wish to reach the full world wide web but want to be more relevant to specific geographic search queries. When not specified, Google continues the current practice of associating content with the top level domain (e.g. .ca) and the IP address of the server where the content was served from.
I also just took a look at the graphs of Googlebot activity in the Set crawl rate tool now that I have enough data to show graphs. It looks very clean, with the information presented in a nice, uncluttered fashion.
