SoloSEO

Doing Good as Link Bait

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 30th, 2007

I was reading an article (here too) just the other day about how National Amusements, a company that owns 1500+ theaters, gave away free movie tickets (and popcorn and drinks!) for the US armed forces and their families to “offer enjoyment and relaxation, and to keep families together” for the whole month of July. Starting in May (and going on forever it sounds like) any armed forces personnel (and family) will get a discounted admission. (Whether or not you agree with the current conflict, our troops certainly deserve our respect and appreciation for putting their lives on the line.) As I read this it made me want to blog about it and tell other people how neat it was they would do such a thing.

As I continued to think about it, I wondered about how “doing good”, acts of service and charity by organizations that are truly genuine (not just tax deductible), could be the means of really good link bait. National Amusements did not seem to benefit greatly from it in terms of traffic, but hopefully the public considers their image when patronizing theaters. I tried to digg the article last week, but it didn’t have any legs. Perhaps its the wrong audience for such an article, or maybe the title wasn’t quite right, but I really think there could be some great link bait juice out of a “doing good” act.

I searched through the year’s top diggs and could only really find one that was “doing good”, a plea for help/attention for a man whose house was demolished by the city, but even then it was more of a “can you believe this, get this guy some attention” kind of “doing good”.

I glanced through Reddit and a few other social news sites but couldn’t find much in the few minutes I took there, but I thought I’d open it up to our readers, do you remember much “link bait” coming from a “doing good” act by businesses or individuals?

1 comment Visited 1069 times April 30th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Report Search Spam

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on April 27th, 2007

I was plowing through the myriad of blogs yesterday and found a couple of things I found interesting in Rand’s post called Identifying and Calling out Web Spam on Engine Blogs. While I find the endless online discussion of marketing spam, what it is, where it is, and the ethics of spam to be as about as dry a topic as there is, worse than reading the tax code, there was a couple of points in this post worth comment. One had really nothing to do with spam theory, but was generally good online SEO advice, but I did take issue with this point.

Rand states there is some unspoken, yet understood code of conduct amongst SEOs, that they simply do not report one another for spamming techniques used by some to improve site rankings. Silly. Rand doesn’t proclaim to be educated in the art of competition or business, but in SEO, so he gets a free pass on this affront to the very basics of competitive theory. To those of us who are running our own non-SEO business, if we find our competitors are benefiting in the rankings by utilizing spamming techniques, then we owe it to ourselves and firms to report them. I do not consider myself to be a SEO, just a business person who uses SEO techniques to help our businesses do better online. And I believe most of our readers are in the same boat, just business people trying to make a living. Unfair competition is never allowable, and the “aw shucks” response is rarely successful. Every one of us needs to join the fight to level the search playing field, making it as fair as possible for everyone to be successful if they compete respectfully online. If your competitors are up to no good, and gaming the SERPs, report them, and continue to report them until the problem is addressed. The unwritten SEO code of conduct can be adhered to by that little group, but it makes no sense in business, it is bad policy. Spamming is bad for the net, bad for the economy and flat out cheating in every sense. I am looking forward to the day when spammers are picked up and prosecuted in a court of law, just as is done daily to other lying, cheating, greedy people in the offline business world.

I would go so far to say, if you know your competitor well enough, and are friendly with them, it might be worth a phone call or email just to let them know what is going on with their site. If the competitor has an SEO working for them, they may not be aware the SEO is using spamming techniques to improve the company’s search rankings. This heads-up might solve the problem right there, and it will keep things friendly. If you aren’t friends, or don’t feel comfortable communicating directly, then report the offenses. When your competitor’s pages disappear into supplemental purgatory, and their rankings fall, I am sure your competitor will have a nice talk with their SEO guy to figure out why. Which will be where the SEO blames the SE algo, the tides, and global warming for the instant drop in the SERP results.

On a more positive note.

Rand claims his firm only reports on spam inadvertently in their blog posts, and gives four reasons. The 4 points really don’t matter to most of us, so its not big news. But point #2, taken as general advice, is an excellent reminder as to where we need to focus our online marketing efforts. He states:

You’ll have a far greater return on your productivity time optimizing your site, building content, getting links and conducting press & marketing than you will reporting your competitors for what looks like a paid link.

Okay, as mentioned above, forget the garbage about not reporting on your competitors concerning spam, it doesn’t take much time, so just do it for Google here and Yahoo! here, and protect yourself and your business. But when the majority of our online marketing efforts is spent working and implementing good solid SEO techniques, then we are going to see results and better our ranking over time, and these benefits become long term. That much is very true and it is very sound advice, it is nice to see some established SEOs suggest we focus on the basics.

Build your online business, as you have built your off-line business. Focus on quality, service, branding, and SEO the site the right way, and a sustainable, solid ranking is very probable. But make sure to protect yourself if competitors attempt to slime their way in above you in the SERPs, report them, and continue to report on them until they are buried in supplemental oblivion, where they belong until they get their act together.

3 comments Visited 1567 times April 27th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Easy Robots.txt Builder

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 25th, 2007

Clickability has created a really nice Robots.txt Builder that helps you to configure your Robots.txt file. You can easily build a Robots.txt file to disallow robots into your file structure. There are options for easily adding web search robots, image search, contextual ads, web archivers, and even “bad robots”. The bad robots puts in a default list of a ton of robots that you can keep out.

With the announcement of the new sitemap autodiscovery code for Robots.txt, I hope they add something for this, even though its pretty easy to implement yourself.

2 comments Visited 1399 times April 25th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Happy Birthday to Aaron!

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 24th, 2007

It’s a big day for Aaron here at SoloSEO! Happy Birthday! Aaron has been such a great inspiration and motivation to me. He is an amazing entrepreneur and an amazing dad to his family.

I hope you have an awesome birthday Aaron! You deserve it!

Add comment Visited 834 times April 24th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Google Categories - Changes to Competitive SEO

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on April 19th, 2007

Lee Odden blogged about Google Categories yesterday. I wasn’t able to duplicate the categories look, but it did get me thinking about the ramifications to online competition if categories in search become commonplace. As well as how categories might influence our SEO strategies as business owners.

Competing in the non-online marketplace has been a focus of research, and resulted in various competitive philosophies put forth by some of the most respected academic business minds in the world. Michael Porter of Harvard fame is one who has essentially dedicated his entire academic life to the concepts of competitiveness, and is seen my many (including myself) as the foremost expert in traditional competitive strategic analysis. But it is interesting to note, competing online is a different animal, and requires a different approach many traditional marketers aren’t quite comfortable with. Let’s take the shoe industry for example. Locally I can think of maybe a couple dozen places I could go and buy shoes, depending on what type of shoe I was looking for. So these local shoe resellers now compete against one another to attract my business. They buy newspaper and radio ads, do mailings, maybe rent a billboard, but they each attempt to get their message out to us, to keep us coming to them, and hopefully staying away from their competitors. But they now also need to keep our attention away from online shoe retailers, which is quite a different task, but important as more potential clients find online shopping appealing. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I bought shoes from a local brick and mortar store. I usually buy from Zappos.com… because I love the huge selection, the customer reviews, the free overnight shipping, and the free shipping on returns. It is a fabulous, no hassle system. Not to mention I don’t have to drive to the mall, deal with the crowds, or with my 2 year old daughter demanding to ride the “wee” (her term for slide) at the mall’s germ ridden treehouse (playground). It is a cesspool of all things icky (bless my wife for always having some Purell on hand to keep me sane).

So as more brick and mortar shops finally decide they also need to have an online presence, they will quickly determine the online competitive environment is very different, and can be intimidating. Not only are there far more competitors, as the geographical bounds are erased, but there are also non-retail sites competing for the same precious keywords. For example, if you type in “running shoes” in Google, you will see both online shoes stores, but also sites which review running shoes listed in the SERPs. So online retailers have to not only compete against more than just other retailers for keywords, but against information sites as well, as they attempt to squeeze onto the first SERP.

I have mentioned in previous posts that we use SEO techniques to improve our sites, so they perform better than our competitors sites. We pay little attention to other sites competing for the same keywords, who aren’t selling the same products, or are just informational sites. For example, we personally don’t care if Wikipedia ranks higher than our site for a particular keyword(s), since a potential customer can’t buy the products we sell from Wiki. We don’t consider Wikiesque sites an important aspect to our competitor focused SEO efforts. But how would Google’s Categories SERP influence competitive SEO efforts? In the Google screen shot in Lee’s post, we can see the categories listed as Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. I would be interested to know how these categories were decided upon, and if these will be the only categories for every search return, or will the search categories change based on the term searched? Is the order of the categories consistent, or will it change based on the keyword searched? We will need answers to these questions to properly prepare our SEO strategies. Obviously Google will need to be aware of those which will attempt to game the system and get their site listed in the top category, or in as many categories as possible, without regard to which category they should properly be placed within. I would imagine Google will only allow any given domain to be included in one category, period, or will have some protocol in place to best deal with these issues and how to police the system to hopefully be as efficient and relevant as possible.

Despite all the potential headaches Google might face, I like the idea of searches organized by category. And what I like most as a business person is through a search engine category system, the online competitive environment would more closely mirror the non-online competitive world. Now retailers could compete to be included in the Stores section of a SERP, and Wikipedia and others will be relegated to the References or Reviews sections where they belong. Also, as a searcher out to buy a product, hopefully it would be possible to set my preferences to drop the sites in the Reviews, References and Others sections, so I would just get a page full of retailers for me to peruse, perfect! Then, if we also throw the whole concept of Local search into the discussion, all of a sudden I could see the same couple dozen local shoes stores mentioned earlier listed on a locally-based, shoe oriented SERP. That would be pretty cool, I still won’t buy from them, but it would be pretty cool. As they now would compete against one another, as they have been doing in the “real world” for quite some time. Pretty interesting stuff.

3 comments Visited 1757 times April 19th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Google Zigs… Let The Whining Commence.

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on April 18th, 2007

Between the tragedy at Virginia Tech yesterday, a few headaches here at work, and the fact I had to send in a check for taxes, I was glad to finally turn off my lights and put yesterday in the books. It was quite an emotional day for many I am sure. To all of those with children, friends, relatives and fellow classmates attending VaTech, our prayers are with you, and we pray you find peace from such a senseless act. This tragedy has scarred many, and abruptly and unfairly ended many bright futures, to the despair of any decent human. There is no understanding a situation like this, I wish it wasn’t now a part of our country’s history. It is something I don’t want my kids to have to learn about, it is heart wrenching, it is sad.

Now on to far less important matters. In SEO land there continues to be a conundrum concerning Google’s decision to discount the ranking influence of paid links. I wanted to throw out a few thoughts at this comparatively insignificant mess. Firstly, I must say I was impressed with Michael’s reaction to the announcement, as he took the “problem” head on from a programming standpoint. He masterfully came up with an insightful solution. The code Michael offered is an excellent way for those providing SEO services to still get the ranking results they crave from paid links, by not allowing Google to “know” they are paying for links, while it also offered full disclosure to the public (as required by law) that the link was a paid link. I really liked the solution, it was pro-active and effective. I also agree it is not our responsibility to assist a public company improve the manner in which they rank sites. If Google wants to discount the referral power of a paid link, and they feel it is better for their search clients overall, then that is exactly what they should do, but it is up to them to create the system. The public should not necessarily rush to comply with these requests and make Google’s job any easier, even if it was a good idea. Google came up with the algo which put them at the top of the search heap, so let them continue to refine their system to deliver the results they feel are most relevant to their clients, with or without the public’s help. That is Google’s original purpose as a company, to provide an algo which offered better search results than the competitors, so please Google, continue to improve your core competency. It is a simple Business 101 principle.

What I don’t understand is the upheaval against Google, I have blogged about this previously, so can I finally get some cheese with all this whine? I have no problem with Google asking for help from the public, why should anyone? It is a free country, and frankly a smart business move. It is far cheaper to have a free work force sending in possible sites with paid links, then to have little Googlers scouring the web to identify all the paid links themselves, especially with some very intelligent SEO folks out there attempting to hide them. Additionally, if the public wants to give Google the heads up, again, it’s a free country. And if Google is dumb enough to instantly punish sites based on a referral from the public, before doing any research to confirm the paid link claim, then they can go right ahead and do that as well, but it would be very, very bad for business. It is business, we are all free to screw up as bad as we can in the marketplace, it is our choice in a free economy. If Google begins to act like they know it all in search, and they feel the public is just going to sit there and take them shoving bad new policies down our throats, Google will eventually fail. This eventuality is based on years of history, and the natural order of things in the business world. No one company has enough money to just push the public around indefinitely, we eventually get sick of it and go somewhere else. If Google wants play the arrogant fool, and sees their cash on hand as a license to stop listening to the search public, they will fall from search grace. The free market has continually punished pig-headed companies which make these types of ignorant assumptions.

As to the revolt and ire by some who are spewing at Google’s announcement, I guess it is predictable. Rants and converse opinions can make for great posts, and controversy is a nice form of link bait. But in the end the reality is Google can do whatever they want, they have earned the right, which was awarded to them by the search public. Perhaps many are blogging their upset to stir up the search public with their cries of injustice against Google. It isn’t a bad strategy, but it will need to be a bit more organized to be effective, since barely anyone in the real world know SEOs exist, so any effort to change the search public’s opinion will have very little influence in the current era. As I see it, it will always boil down to “is Google delivering me the results I need?” Search clients don’t really care about all the rest of this noise, most don’t even know Google made an announcement, or that anyone has been frantically typing about it for a few days. As long as search clients find what they are looking for, quickly, and on the first SERP, then they will continue to be happy, and switching to Yahoo, or Ask or anyone else as their SE of choice isn’t going to happen. It is human nature. If it ain’t broke, or if I don’t know it ain’t broke, I’m not going to lift a finger to fix it. That is the current search reality.

1 comment Visited 1202 times April 18th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 16th, 2007

There is a big brouhaha over Matt Cutt’s recent postings (yes, 3 of them) about the disclosure of paid links (big one here, another here, and one more here). There’s been a lot of postings about it, with a great summary here by GrayWolf at SEOclass.com, some here by GrayWolf at Wolf-Howl.com, more here from Todd Malicoat of StuntDubl.com, more here from Matt McGee of SmallBusinessSEM.com, and another here from Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim.com.

Essentially, Google wants you to disclose paid links to both users and to search engines. Google wants to know which links are “paid” instead of “natural” so they can discount their weight.

My feeling about it is this: Paid links are advertisements, and as such should be distinguished in some way from other links that are not advertisements. The disclosure should not be deceptive to users or to search engines. Disclosure can be subtle and is okay to be undetectable (not deceptively) to search engines/machines.

Google’s own webmaster guidelines specifically discusses that we should not do things specifically for search engines, but focus on the users:

Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

If we look at other forms of marketing and advertising, there must be disclosure for advertisements. If you read a newspaper, it reads “This is a Paid Advertisement” somewhere on/near the ad. If you watch infomercials, it says “This is a Paid Advertisement”. If you listen to the radio and hear a political ad, it is disclosed as a political ad. If you look at Adwords and other text ads by search engines it has some form of disclosure, like “Ads by Google”. If you see a banner ad, well it either screams “I’m an ad” because it’s an image and it looks like an ad, or it says “Advertisement” somewhere. These advertising property owners do not make these statements because they are pretty or interesting, but to obey laws for advertising disclosure.

And now, for what you all have been waiting for…

The Perfect Solution to Paid Link Disclosure

So, I have the perfect solution for you to disclose your paid links to users and not search engines, that anyone can implement quickly and easily. This method makes it virtually impossible for a machine to implement an algorithm based on this code, but makes it fully disclosed to users.

To see the paid link disclosure in action, click on the following link (the next page has the link examples):

SEE EXAMPLE PAID LINK DISCLOSURE HERE

How to implement Paid Link Disclosure

Step 1

Copy the CSS code below and paste it in your existing CSS file for your site. (or create one, or put it in the template of your site so it shows up on each page).

a:hover.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a:hover.linky {}

Step 2

Change the name “linkx” to something else and don’t include words like paid or ad or affiliate. This keeps variability from site to site and gives it no semantic meaning. “linky” can be changed to something else also, but essentially all that is doing is giving your other links a class so that all links have a class assigned to it and cannot be “filtered” based on having a class attribute.

Step 3

Create an image that in some way reflects that the link is paid. Don’t just copy my $ image here, use a unique image and rename the filename to something else (keep it ambiguous). You may want to use a star, an asterisk, an exclamation point, or a turtle. It should be unique to you so again there is no regularity for the search engines, but at the same time it gives appropriate disclosure to your users. Place this image file behind the folder you created in step 4.

Step 4

Create a folder (give it any name, just be creative) and disallow search engines from access to this folder (learn how to do this in your Robots.txt file). No this is not deceptive, you just don’t want them to go there. This is for step 5.

Step 5

Create a file in the directory you just created and include a disclosure about paid links, describing that you disclose paid links by using an image icon next to links when a user mouses over them. I wouldn’t even include the icon on the page, just describe it with text, like “A dollar sign icon will appear when you mouse over a paid link”.

Step 6

Add the class attribute that you renamed in Step 2 above to the anchor tag of your paid links and any new paid links.

This solution would be incredibly difficult, and I would go as far as to say “impossible”, for Google and others to detect on a wide scale basis (which is what they face). Their problem is that this code is ambiguous, and could be doing any number of things besides attributing a paid link, and so they cannot fully determine that it is actually a paid link based on the CSS itself. But you’re still being ethical because users are aware before they click on the link that it is a paid link.

If you want to disclose paid links without having to hover, just modify the CSS code above and take out the “hover” part (see live page here of it in action):

a.linkx {
    background-image: url(/images/solop.gif);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    padding-left:10px;
}
a.linky {}

If you have any improvements or other suggestions, add them to the comments below.

UPDATE: Matt McGee gives his idea for a solution, which is quite novel too.

13 comments Visited 2953 times April 16th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Even The Big Guys Must Know The Basics

Posted by Aaron R Stewart on April 13th, 2007

I had the chance to sit down with a large, multi-national, manufacturing company the other day. We did some research on the company before I went into the meeting, just to get a feel for how they were doing online. We knew they were large, had hundreds of employees, spent quite a bit on traditional forms of marketing, and we were curious to see if they were allocating any resources to their online marketing efforts. What we found was quite telling. Between all the different divisions this company had over 15,000 pages buried in the supplemental bone yard, not to mention little to no rankings for keywords we considered highly relevant to their business interests.. So we knew they obviously needed some direction just to fix this aspect of their online efforts. We found that distributors from their large network had just been scraping the manufacturer’s site, using the corporate product descriptions on their own sites; not good when you are looking to rank well.

The meeting was held in one of the division President’s LARGE office, on the top floor, with tons of windows and very impressive. The meeting began with them taking some time to explain to me each division, the products, the markets, and their plans to launch a new replicated website system to be offered to their entire distributor network. The distributor network is quite large, with over 100,000 active distributors world-wide. Currently distributors choosing to market online do it on their own, selling the manufacturer’s products through their own efforts and sites. To address some legal issues, the manufacturer has put together a team of employed “compliance officers” who scour the distributor sites daily to ensure the claims made concerning the products are appropriate and legal, and frankly it sounded like quite a bit of tedious, thankless work. I don’t know how many distributors actually do have sites, but with over 100,000 active distributors, the numbers would have to be pretty high.

Eventually they told me how excited they were about the launch of their new replicated site program, and it was their intention to launch over 100,000 sites all at once, and that they were expecting great search results for all their products when this happened, as each replicated site would link back to the corporate site, and would increase their online presence for each product in their lines. Here is where we had a problem, they were going to launch all 100,000 + sites with identical content, with only the name of the distributor being different, and no capabilities for the distributor to add or modify any content on their own. They went on to explain how the launch was going to be a big deal and they had spent a considerable amount (I am sure millions) to produce the system (including hardware requirement to host them all), a system-wide launch party, etc. Imagine the horror when I attempted to politely, yet candidly inform them they would see no benefit to their search rankings when these sites were launched. It was a bit uncomfortable there for a few minutes. I then discussed their current supplemental pages situation (and was so grateful we had done a bit of research), and how their new launch of identical sites would essentially become the same situation, just on a larger scale. Taking their supplemental page totals considerably higher, but with no real effect on their rankings for any of their products, or their corporate site.

We discussed various options to address the problem, but nothing was finalized. I am not sure what the end result will be, this company obviously has spent considerable time and effort in the new system, and just wanted to launch to see all the success, I felt bad about being the bearer of bad news. But without addressing the duplicate content issues, launching “as is” would unfortunately be a colossal waste of money, and since the time spent to date is already shot, I hope they address the problems before the launch occurs. I must say I am still quite shocked the IT or Web group of this company did not already know their system was flawed. The importance of unique content is one of the most basic and proven concepts of good SEO. We talk, blog, and have conferences about it all the time, and yet here was a large multi-national company ready to launch a multi-million dollar system, in hopes of improving their online positioning, and they didn’t know the problem of duplicate content. It was quite eye-opening.

Moral of the story, no matter if your site/company is big or small, there are very basic aspects of SEO we all must know, and not knowing them could be very costly. While you and I aren’t going to throw away millions if we make bad SEO decisions, others could. I would strongly advise companies spending considerable amounts on your online efforts, to make sure they are well-versed in the basic principles of SEO, either by reading, or by finding some savvy SEO consultant. In a previous post Michael shares a list of blog authors, reading these blogs is an excellent place to start learning SEO. Please take the time to become more SEO knowledgeable, and put those potentially lost millions toward something else, like local charities, employee training programs, or even a donation to the Aaron R. Stewart Fun Fund (ARSMFF), which would be greatly appreciated, and quickly utilized.

3 comments Visited 1139 times April 13th, 2007 Aaron R Stewart

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Report Content Theft! Submit and View Domains That Steal Content

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

I’m sick of trackbacks to my blog from other sites that steal my content. Sure they “cite” me with a link, but it doesn’t count when you say “submitted by kaker” and then link to me, and it doesn’t count even if you link to me and say “read more”. If you’re just quoting me or commenting on a post, you are not stealing my content.

So, I thought I’d start keeping track of these content thieves, and I wanted to let you too!

Report Content Theft and View Domains That Steal Content

I’d love it if someone took this one step further on this and made a wordpress plugin. The plugin would:

1) Add to this list when you find a site that does this.
2) Block any comments/trackbacks from this site
3) Reports to some blacklist somewhere?

I’m not worried about getting out-competed by these slimeballs, but I don’t want someone monetizing on my hard work and tainting my name with their unethical practices.

6 comments Visited 4212 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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Yes, you SHOULD Submit a Sitemap to Google

Posted by Michael D Jensen on April 12th, 2007

While others have spoken against submitting your sitemap to Google et al., I am going to stand up for sitemaps all across the web, and give you several good reasons for having a sitemap (now you can do sitemap autodiscovery instead of submitting).

1) Get to know your site - Every site owner should know what a sitemap is and to have at least physically seen what it looks like and glance at the pages it contains. Many sitemaps, interestingly, end up with images, favicons, and stylesheets listed in them, which is not what the sitemap is intended for.

2) Improves index freshness - If you blog once or twice a day, run a news site, or have user-generated content, your sitemap can help search engines get familiar with your pace so their index keeps up nice and fresh.

3) Trust and Credibility - Although probably not a huge factor, submitting a sitemap does show to search engines you are real, exist, and care enough to create a sitemap. I doubt the majority of the spam sites that steal blog posts (mine and yours) for their own content actually use and submit a sitemap. My philosophy is that anything that can improve credibility and trust with a search engine is a good thing, especially when establishing a new domain.

Some people have complained about seeing pages drop out of the index because of submitting a sitemap, and then once they remove it they see an increase. There’s a nice thread over at digitalpoint on this topic. Ultimately I don’t think it’s necessarily your sitemap. The number of pages indexed can fluctuate week to week for any site. And if there is a huge drop in pages, you may want to consider checking out your sitemap to see if it is giving full coverage to all the pages of your site.

So my opinion is yes, you should submit a sitemap. Some people think the search engines are “evil”, but they’re really trying to deliver a fantastic product that users will enjoy and use. They’re not trying to “trick” us by asking for a sitemap. They have spent millions of dollars supporting the ability to submit a sitemap, and its not so they can drop pages from their index. They want to be better and they want you to be better.

So go ahead, create a sitemap!

If you need some help creating a sitemap, sign up for SoloSEO where you can easily create and update your sitemap. There are also many other tools out there, although we think ours is pretty slick.

1 comment Visited 2641 times April 12th, 2007 Michael D Jensen

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