Google has been working on updates to how it uses sitemaps. Considering research highlighted in this study (pdf), which showed how search engines find new and changed content faster with sitemaps, webmasters should take note.

For one, Google and the other search engines that make up sitemaps.org are now supporting as many as 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files. In the past, they only supported 1,000. With this increased limit, webmasters can submit up to 2.5 billion URLs with one sitemap index.

Google’s Webmaster Tools design update shows users all sitemap files that were submitted for a verified site. By the way, here’s a brief look at the update:

"This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file," notes John Müller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. In addition, the indexed URL count for sitemap files in Webmaster Tools is "more precise" according to Müller.

XSD schemas have been updated to allow sitemap extensions. This allows for the creation of better sitemaps through the verification of more features. Müller says that sitemap file processing is also much faster than before, meaning the time it takes to submit a sitemap file, process it and see initial data, is much shorter.

The question is, are you taking advantage of all of this? If you don’t use sitemaps or aren’t sure if you’re doing it the right way, I would suggest perusing the following resources:

- The Study Mentioned Earlier – Sitemaps: Above and Beyond the Crawl of Duty

- Sitemaps.org

- Google’s Sitemaps FAQs

- Google’s Sitemaps Help Center

- Googles Forum Search

If you own a website and are heavily involved in trying to promote your website you need to be very careful about how you operate your advertising campaign and how your website is designed as you may be preaching Googles webmaster guidelines and could get your website penilised and even get banned from Google

I recently had one of my websites hit by Google and i had page 1 listings for all my keywords and then one day i logged on and found out i was on page 6 for all my keywords.  When this happens its impossible to find out what caused the penalty as Google keep this information out of the public domain as to keep the spammers guessing.

A number of things you need to avoid on your website are the following to avoid getting your website banned or experience the page 6 penalty:

Web design Guidelines

• Ensure that on your website you have no hidden text
• Do not sell any links on your website.  If you do have out going links on your homepage make sure they have the “nofollow” tag
• Add a sitemap to your website
• Do not fill your website with keywords (keyword spamming)
• Check your website has no broken links
• Make sure you have less than 100 links on each page

Technical Guidelines

• Make sure your web server supports the “If modified Since HTTP header.  This tells Google that your website content has changed since it was last crawled
• Set up a Robots.txt file on your webserver which tells search engine what pages to crawl and what not to index
• Make sure your website can be viewed in different browsers
• Make sure your website loads in a reasonable speed, check your server isn’t over loaded

Quality Guidelines

•  Try to design your website for users and not primarly for search engines.  Do not cloak any links
• Avoid any black hat methods to help improve your search engine rankings quickly
• Dont exchange links with other websites
• Try to avoid linking to spammy websites and “Bad neighbourhoods”
• Dont use software that sends automated queries from your website to Google
• Dont load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Try to avoide duplicate content on your web pages
• Dont have web pages that have hidden programs as phishing, viruses, trojans or other badware
• Dont create doorway pages for search engines or any other “cookie cutter” such as affiliate programs that redirect a user from a page with little or no content
• If your website is participating in an affiliate program make sure your website provides good relevant content for the user in mind and not just a doorway page
• Try not to build up your backlinks too quickly and make sure your anchor text backlink is not all the same as to look like spam

When building up your backlinks keep the following in mind:

• Build up slowly and steady
• Use as many different anchor texts, as using the same will be classed as spam
• Try to avoid having your link on a site that is known as a spammer or part of a “Bad Neighbourhood” (e.g FFA Link Farms)
• Try to avoid linking from duplicate content (e.g article website submission services, that will submit 1 article to 1,000’s of websites.
• Try to avoid buying PR links on other websites, if you do have the “nofollow” tag associated with your link
• Avoid any type of link exchange with another website
• Dont advertise the fact that you sell links on your website
• If you have a links page on your website, make sure all your outgoing links have the “nofollow” tag associated with any links, as Google may think your selling links

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