Vishnu Prasad Blog

As part of Search Engine Optimization strategy, Sitemaps provide a way for the crawlers to index your site. There are 2 types of Sitemaps, Human friendly sitemaps and Crawler friendly sitemap.

Human friendly sitemaps provide a textual map of the website which is being viewed. Some links could be buried deep in a site that could be easily located using the sitemap by humans. Example Microsoft PressPass Sitemap

Crawler Friendly Sitemaps are those which help the crawler to uncover deeplinks in the website and help them understand the site better.

Before Sitemap.org came into existence all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN wanted web masters to format their feed for their crawlers. This made it extremely difficult for the webmasters to submit their updated content automatically to the search engines. Google then came up with http://Sitemaps.org. Sitemaps is an XML based format which is now supported by all major search engines. It is extensible and provides the search engines to better “understand” the website. Unlike the normal sitemap protocol, sitemaps.org protocol provides additional information to search engines like the change frequency of the page, last modified date of the file, the relative priority of a URL when compared to other URL’s in your site. This can help the crawler not only to index the site but also obtain meta information about the site. The sitemaps protocol can be found here

Interesting facts about Sitemaps.org

1. The protocol for sitemaps.org was developed by Google but the site is hosted with Yahoo!. A Whois lookup shows that the nameservers for sitemaps.org points to YNS1.YAHOO.COM and YNS2.YAHOO.COM. A good strategy to gather Yahoo support.
2. This really isn’t a fact per se, but good to know. The meta description in the Whois reads as “The Sitemaps protocol enables webmasters to information earch engine about pages on their site that are available for crawling”.

Most of the popular blogging platforms like Wordpress, Community Server, Typepad, blogger etc have add-on’s which are SEO friendly.

/Vishnu

I am currently working on Search Engine Optimization for an online marketplace. I do have a brief idea about SEO but for this assignment I need to come up with best practices. There are a lot of techniques but one thing which caught my attention was Cloaking.

Cloaking is a technique by which different content is delivered by the website based on whether the request is made by a spider (search engine crawler) or a browser (user). Cloaking can be achieved either by finding out the IP address or the User Agent HTTP header request.

In IP address cloaking based on the well known IP address of spiders, content is served by the website. Most of the search engines spiders have a well known range of IP address using which they crawl the web. The website monitors and serves special content based on the IP addresses. The catch here is to find obtain the range of IP addresses of the spiders and target them. Pretty sure that popular search engines wont give away their list of IP addresses. This said, it wont be too hard for site webmaster/admins to find them out if they monitor the requests closely.

In User Agent HTTP header request technique, every requesting entity like web browser, crawler, mobile device and other clients identify themselves to the server by sending the ser agent type in the HTTP request.

This is my first post on SEO. Will be adding a lot more soon.

Happy Blogging