Yahoo!, along with Google and Microsoft, is announcing Cross-host submission for Sitemaps, which will make it easier for webmasters to manage their Sitemap submissions to the major search engines. With this announcement, webmasters can now submit Sitemaps that correspond to several differently-hosted websites using a single mechanism.

For background, a Sitemap file contains the URLs for the pages on a site along with meta-data, such as priority, last crawled date and change frequency for the content. To ensure validity of this metadata, Sitemaps have previously been required to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contain. This requirement forced the Sitemaps files to be hosted on the same servers as the actual site content.

With today’s announcement, a Sitemap can now be hosted on a different host and path than the URLs it contains. For example, say you have a Sitemap (sitemap-www.xml) for the URLs on http://www.example.com but you want to put that Sitemap on http://sitemaps.example.com. That is now possible. To make the Sitemap valid and preserve data security you need to refer to it from the robots.txt file on the site where the URLs it contains are located. For example, add the following line to http://www.example.com/robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://sitemaps.example.com/sitemap-www.xml

Our collaboration with Google and Microsoft began back in November 2006 when we announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about how webmasters and site owners manage their sites and feeds. We know that segregating user facing content from feeds, like Sitemaps, is important. We’ve also learned that managing feeds for large websites or websites using third party feed publishing services is critical. We hope this enhancement helps address those needs.

We’ll continue to work on addressing the needs of our webmasters through new standards and protocols. If you have other thoughts about how we can collaborate with other search engines on standards such as robots.txt, we’d love to hear from you. Leave us a comment below, or give us your feedback here.

Details about the Sitemaps protocol, including our recent addition, are available on the protocol website. Or, if you’re at SMXW this week, bring your questions to our panelists and speakers.

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By: Priyank Garg
Source: www.ysearchblog.com

By: Mandeep

1. Keyword Stuffing

This is a technique to over stuff the Web page with repetition of a given keyword to get influencing search engine results. Keyword stuffing should be in boundaries. Search engines caught this trick very easily.

2. Similar Pages With Different Title

Don’t Spread the similar pages in your site. For example if you have a travel site with different pages but same information for two cities, collide them in one.

3. Link Farms

“Google hates link farms”
links farm is a huge set of highly interlinked pages, either with a fake content or some content scraped anywhere in little bits. The primary purpose of creating Link Farms is to give high number of links to a given Web site or increasing their link popularity score.These links are not “real” and so they are trying change search engine results.
The process of exchanging reciprocal links with Web sites in order to increase search engine optimization.

4. Duplicate Content

Search engines “Hate” duplicate content. They don’t want to spend their resources to index duplicate content. Creating unique content takes long time and great energy. Just because of this some may try to creep content from other sites and republish it for search engine to index their pages. “It’s unethical“.

5. Bridge Pages

These are basically fake pages which are over loaded with content and optimised for one or two keywords which again link to landing pages. These pages redirect the user to the page that the Web site actually wants the user to visit. Bridge Pages (doorway and gateway pages) are illegal and not allowed on major Internet search engines.

6. Cloaking

Cloaking is a form of Bridge Pages. Web sites use this technique to show the content of the page to search engine spiders for indexing and present entirely different page to the users. This technique is used to mislead the search engine robot.
Cloaked Web sites even ban or blacklist by search engines because it completely cheat the search engine’s algorithms.

7. Hidden Text

This is clouded content which usually invisible to user & only read-able by the search engine.
This technique is used to overload the keywords or keyword-phrases which are invisible to the user but helped in increasing ranking from search engine. Some time the we use White text on White background which a normal human user cannot see.
Avoid to use hidden text because you can play this trick with search engine for short period.
Their is a risk to having your site banned finally by search engines.

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“Search Monkey” tools will let Web site owners supplement Yahoo-generated search results

Yahoo Inc. is planning to open its Yahoo Search engine to allow third parties to add a wide variety of data to search results.

Code-named “Search Monkey,” the new open-source application programming interfaces (API) that Yahoo is slated to detail today will allow Web site owners to add information such as ratings and reviews, images, deep links and other data directly to the Yahoo Search results Web page.

“Our intent is clear — present users with richer, more useful search results so that they can complete their tasks more efficiently and get from ‘to-do’ to ‘done,’” noted Vish Makhijani, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo Search. “So instead of a simple title, abstract and URL, for the first time, users will see rich results that incorporate the massive amount of data buried in Web sites.”

Web site owners can supply Yahoo with data, and the company’s Machined Learned Ranking technology will ensure that the results are presented to users at the correct time, he added.

“We believe that combining a free, open platform with structured, semantic content from across the Web is a clear win for all parties involved — site owners, Yahoo and, most importantly, our users,” Makhijani said. “And by the way, users will be in complete control of the experience and will be able to turn off anything related to open search if they so desire.”

In an example provided by Yahoo, a search result for a Japanese restaurant in California that previously would have included the URL, an abstract and an address would provide ratings, price information and links for reviews and photos with the new tools. Yahoo plans to provide additional details on how the open search tool will work over the next few months.

Not to be outdone, Google Inc. posted a reminder Monday that its similar effort, called Subscribed Links, allows users to create custom search results that users can add to their own Google search pages. Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer and head of Google’s Webspam team, noted that Subscribed Links, which Google debuted in 2006, allows users to “display links to your services, answer questions, and calculate useful quantities and more.”

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Source: www.computerworld.com