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Google's Study On Effectiveness Of Sitemaps 
By: Courtney Mills 2009-05-08 Google have given us an insight into the effectiveness of sitemaps through a recent study. Sitemaps are an easy way for site owners to help search engines index pages on their sites. Google initially announced sitemaps as an experiment back in 2005, with Yahoo! and Microsoft jumping on board not long after. Until now, there has been little research to conclude how effective sitemaps really are, well until now that is. The study was based around 3 website case studies - Amazon, CNN, and Pubmed. Amazons sitemaps include around 20 million URLs. They also take effort to indicate the canonical, or best URL versions, of product pages in their XML sitemap. CNNs approach to XML sitemaps focuses upon helping a search engine find the many new URLs which are added daily, and also addressing canonical issues with their pages. Pubmed has a huge archive of URLs listed in their XML sitemaps; however they dont update these often (the change rate of URLs listed is monthly). It was quite a detailed study with the final paper being 10 pages long. Knowing that your lives are no doubt too busy to read this, here is a rundown on some interesting facts: * Approximately 35 million Sitemaps were published, as of October 2008. * The 35 million Sitemaps include several billion URLs. * Most popular Sitemap formats include XML (77%), Unknown (17.5%), URL list (3.5%), Atom (1.6%) and RSS (0.11%). * 58% of URLs in Sitemaps contain the last modification date. * 7% of URLs contain the change frequency field. * 61% of URLs contain the priority field. If you would really like to read the 10 page summary of the study, then you can find it here. Otherwise, check out the great summary from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land. If youre not using XML sitemaps on your web site, then this study highlights the need for you to consider adding them. Comments Tag: sitemaps Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Reddit |  Furl Have a bookmark! -  About the Author: Courtney is an online marketing specialist at ineedhits - a leading search engine marketing firm with over 11 years experience. Courtney has been living and breathing marketing for over 2 years and specializes in web and permission email marketing and providing news and opinion to online marketing communities. |
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