Filed under Search Engine Strategies 2006
Sitemaps.org, born of historic collaboration between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, intends to simplify the tenuous endeavor of directing search engines to your site’s relevant content. Thus, sitemaps are garnering renewed focus and while the forge is still hot, Vanessa Fox helps clear the smoke. Who better to press a key member of Google Sitemaps for answers than Rand Fishkin, SEO expert from SEOmoz.org.
Does a duplicate content filter induce duplicate content penalties? What about format preference? Is XML king or can a simple text file suffice? What the hell is OAI-PMH? Given some recent dialog on sitemaps versus other SEO methods, Vanessa reiterates the intent of a sitemap: it should be merely one part of the strategy.
“[Google] Sitemaps doesn’t impact your ranking at all… it helps with the very first obstacle of learning about all of your pages.” It’s about crawling, thus it doesn’t preclude code optimization, site organization or other sensible methods in SEO. It may indirectly allow for better ranking but won’t provide it.
Fox also addresses common concerns such as code to text ratio, priority settings and Google Toolbar’s pagerank reports versus Google Webmaster Tool’s.
“[Webmaster Tools] is a little more accurate, a little more up-to-date… the Toolbar pageranking doesn’t get updated quite as often, of course it’s only one factor. I feel like people get really hung-up on the Toolbar pagerank. People probably spend a little more energy on it than they need to.”
(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5)
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December 6th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
[...] Vanessa Fox Clarifies The Role of Google Sitemaps [...]
December 6th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
[...] Durante la conferencia SES Chicago 2006, Rand Fishkin, CEO de SEOmoz, ha realizado una entrevista en vÃdeo con Vanessa Fox de Google Webmaster Central. [...]
December 6th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
[...] Original video is here. [...]
December 7th, 2006 at 8:06 am
[...] http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ [...]
December 7th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Excellent Interview that answered many of my questions. Keep up the good work.
December 7th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Are Sitemaps important for your blog ?
Googler Vanessa Fox sits down with WebProNews to talk about Sitemaps, and Pagerank among other things.
Also 901am’s Designer Chris Pearson has some great tips for adding a sitemap to your blog.
…
December 7th, 2006 at 11:38 am
[...] Rand Fishkin de SEOMoz.org entrevista a Vanessa fox de Google. Los temas principales que se discuten en esta charla son: contenido duplicado, Pagerank y sitemaps. [...]
December 7th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
[...] The skinny on sitemaps and page rank from the mouth of Google, aka Vanessa Fox. [...]
December 7th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Really clears up a lot of misconception!
December 7th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
WebProNews interview with Google Project Manager
Here’s a 17 minute video interview with Vanassa Fox, a Google project manager. Ms. Fox talks about, Google Sitemaps, Pagerank, duplicate content and lots more.
Here’s some interesting points that were made:
Duplicate Content
There is NO duplicate…
December 7th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
This video addresses many issues a newbie would want to know. Other then that, any real smart webmaster who does 1-2 hr research already knows all of the things that are mentioned in tihs movie and 17 mins is definetly not worth your time. I learned nothing new here, but for new people getting into SEO, it may benefit.
December 7th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
I put this into the category of “Things You’ve Always Wondered About Google Webmaster Tools”. It was great info, and yes, you could hear it from *seasoned* professionals in forums and groups, but some of us feel that hearing things directly from Google is better than 2nd hand info you get from a forum, or newsgroup. It’s always great when Google comes out and sets the record straight in a world of innuendo and rumor.
December 7th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Good interview…just wish he would have let Vanessa talk more instead of interrupting her constantly…especailly at the end.
December 7th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
Vanessa Fox is cute!
December 7th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Found the pointer to the time stamp & crawl frequency useful. What format is your video - Flash? Like the quality.
December 7th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Yes agree - far too many interruptions broke up the flow of her comments and added nothing
December 7th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
[...] [...]
December 7th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
OAI-PMH = Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
I thought everybody knew that?
December 8th, 2006 at 12:40 am
I’m still trying to figure it out. I’ve read and researched, maybe in the wrong places. 17 minutes verses a few more hours of research, no offense, I’ll take the 17 minutes straight from the source thanks. Definately cleared up a few questions I had that have been making my brain itch. Real smart webmaster, I’m still cruising that ‘learning curve’ trying to reach that plateau.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:10 am
I am a relative newcomer to webmaster tools so this will prove very useful
December 8th, 2006 at 9:41 am
[...] WebProNews opublikowało bardzo dobry film, w którym Rand Fishkin - ekspert SEO (optymalizacji stron dla wyszukiwarek) prowadzi wywiad z Vanessą Fox z zespołu Google Webmaster Cental. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 10:21 am
[...] Video of the interview. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 10:34 am
i thought this was supposed to be video?? i only got the audio!!
December 8th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Good points:
- Interesting content
- Good chemistry between fox and fish (kin)
- Good delivery of what can be rather … anyone? anyone know? …uninteresting information
Bad Points:
- Maybe a little more about content and linking freshness
- The webpronews bumpers were a little cheesy
- Buffering was slow
December 8th, 2006 at 10:53 am
[...] Watch the video of the interview. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 11:24 am
[...] Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Central, gives some great tips to webmasters in her interview with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz. You can view the video over at WebProNews. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
I think the article is very help full for the webmaster in general and seo experts in particular .
December 8th, 2006 at 3:56 pm
[...] Re: Site maps there was a good video on webpronews about this exact topic at: WebProNews Video Blog » Blog Archive » SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank if you cant view the video she basically says that it helps search engines navigate your site but is not necessary __________________ http://www.NextWarrenBuffett.com [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Sitebases, the next protocol after Sitemaps
It can save the time and press for the search engine, also for the websites.
It can bring new search engine that named Search Engin 2.0.
Using Sitebase protocol, will save 95% bandwidth above. It is anthother sample for long tail thery.
In this protoco…
December 8th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
[...] Zanimljiv video donosi WebProWorld, a rijeè je o intervjuu Vanesse Fox (Google Sitemaps) koju je intervjuirao Randfish (SEOmoz), zbog toga što je Mike McDonald pobjegao [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Wow. I learned a lot from the interview with Vanessa Fox of Google. There is so much misinformation out there. As a newbie, it’s good to hear it from the horses mouth. She’s very up front and practical. Great interview. I’m going to keep tuning my pages and adding more content. I’m not concerned about site maps now.
December 10th, 2006 at 1:37 am
Sunday Wrap-Up (December 6th, 2006)
Some of the more interesting posts from this week:
SEO Book posts about reciprocal links and how they’re no longer valuable in modern search engines.
Micro Persuasion talks about the death of page views. I don’t entirely believe that the p…
December 10th, 2006 at 11:03 am
WebProNews / Randfish interview with Vanessa Fox
Nice interview here worth a watch by Randfish, covering Google sitemaps, PageRank and some other issues relating to Google.Â
First off, Vanessa clarifies the difference between a dup content filter and dup content penalty. Basically the good word i…
December 10th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
[...] Excellent Video on Google Sitemaps Here is a great video concerning some of the questions many people have over how much Google Sitemaps effects your rankings and some of the features it has. WebProNews Video Blog » Blog Archive » SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank __________________ vBulletin SEO Friendly URLs - A list of current add-ons for turning your urls into SEO friendly urls. Monetizing vBulletin Forums - A list of companies who you can use to monetize your vBulletin Forum Coding with Web Standards in Mind - A basic guide on XHTML 1.0 and Web Standards Brent Wilson - The Ramblings of a Forum Webmaster [...]
December 11th, 2006 at 8:51 am
[...] Why not check it out yourself http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ [...]
December 11th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Vanessa Fox is a real person!!!!
Now can we get her to address the PSS issue?
Morepheus
December 11th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Rand, your hair looks silly!
December 12th, 2006 at 2:10 am
Duplicate Content and Code Text Ratio
Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Central, in an interview with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz gives some great tips to webmasters. Fox clarifies that there are no duplicate penalty for the site with duplicate content. She also points out tha…
December 12th, 2006 at 8:00 am
Great video…makes sense feel free to find more video tools
at my home url http://webtrafficdaily.com
December 13th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
[...] Well that’s not going to happen now, is it, Mr Fishkin? Damn you and your quiffy hair and your Kickass Firefox Sidebar links collection. Now everyone is going to say “Nice links, Mike, but I preferred Rands list”. Grrrrr. [...]
December 14th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
[...] The first was an interview of Google’s Vanessa Fox by Rand Fishkin. In the interview she alludes to the fact that the PageRank that one sees in Google Webmaster Central (if the site is verified), is more accurate than the PR values that appear using the Google toolbar. [...]
December 15th, 2006 at 4:19 am
One of the hardest to watch web videos I have ever seen. I kept a tally and the video needed to stop and buffer 124 times. That’s an average of about 8 seconds of playback for each chunk. I don’t have a super connection (512k ADSL), but that was ridiculous!
Can’t really comment on the content, it was very hard to absorb through all the buffering.
December 15th, 2006 at 10:24 am
@Mike Healy
Fortunately, we’re working on more bandwidth selections here at the video blog. Expect the ability to select a preferred bit rate very, very soon. For the time being, the code to embed one of our entries into your own page displays video at ~300k rather than ~600k as above. Paltry workaround, I know… but better things are coming.
Cheers!
December 16th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
This is an excellent video. Nice to hear some info straight from Google…
December 17th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
[...] It’s about time that Google offers webmasters an accurate snapshot of their websites’ Pagerank. At SES Chicago 2006, Rand Fishkin interviewed Google sitemaps key member Vanessa Fox on Webpronews (video found here). During the interview Vanessa informs webmasters that creating a sitemap specifically for Google sitemaps will only benefit the website by helping the search crawler find web pages that may be orphaned or are too deep inside the website. Therefore, Pagerank will not increase, placement will not increase, and Google will not *like* your website any more than usual. [...]
December 19th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
[...] BTW - I believe this post does a very nice job of wrapping up the conversation that Vanessa Fox and I began during our WebProNews interview (also discussed in this Cre8asite forum thread). [...]
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:10 pm
This maybe a stupid question, but does Google Webmaster tools allow you to view the PageRank of individual pages, or just the distribution that you can see under “Crawl Stats”
December 28th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
[...] The following is an excerpt of a video conversation held between Vanessa Fox, Product Manager of Google Webmaster Central, and Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOMoz about Google and duplicate content. This further confirms Adam Lasnik’s position that it’s a filter, not a penalty. The full video can be found here. Rand Fishkin: Duplicate content filter, is that the same or different to a duplicate content penalty? Vanessa Fox: So I think there is a lot of confusion about this issue. I think people think that if Google sees information on a site that is duplicate within the site then there will some kind of penalty applied (duplicating its own material). There’s a couple of different ways this can happen, one if you use subpages that seem to have a lot of content that is the same, e.g. a local type site that says here is information about Boulder and here’s information about Denver, but it doesn’t actually have any information about Boulder, it just says Boulder in one place and Denver in the other. But otherwise the pages are exactly the same. Another scenario is where you have multiple URL’s that point to the same exact page, e.g. a dynamic site. So those are two times when you have duplicate content within a site. [...]
January 1st, 2007 at 7:54 pm
[...] http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ [...]
January 5th, 2007 at 4:41 am
Google site map is a nightmare to use for me. My site has over 220000 static pages. A new version is over 400000 pages. How do you want to upload that in a file to Google Sitemap?
January 5th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Many thanks for the valuable information given in 17 mins.
We have some major issue to get our site ranked properly ad this helped us a lot. We will work on the structure in RSS soon.
Nokia Download Team
January 8th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
[...] I have just stumbled across this very interesting interview with Venessa Fox, who works for Google. Having recently started to include an xml sitemap in a couple of my sites, I never quite understood their significance. They are not sitemaps in the traditional sense, a page similar to a table of contents. Instead the new standard for sitemaps are only for the benefit of those crawling webbots so that they can find all of your web pages. I actually thought that the job of webbots was to follow links from the homepage, but perhaps they need better directions and a little help once in a while, especially with complicated sites. [...]
January 16th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
any text transcript ? my english not good.
January 17th, 2007 at 5:10 am
[...] The following is an excerpt of a video conversation held between Vanessa Fox, Product Manager of Google Webmaster Central, and Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOMoz about Google and duplicate content. This further confirms Adam Lasnik’s position that it’s a filter, not a penalty. The full video can be found here. Rand Fishkin: Duplicate content filter, is that the same or different to a duplicate content penalty? Vanessa Fox: So I think there is a lot of confusion about this issue. I think people think that if Google sees information on a site that is duplicate within the site then there will some kind of penalty applied (duplicating its own material). There’s a couple of different ways this can happen, one if you use subpages that seem to have a lot of content that is the same, e.g. a local type site that says here is information about Boulder and here’s information about Denver, but it doesn’t actually have any information about Boulder, it just says Boulder in one place and Denver in the other. But otherwise the pages are exactly the same. Another scenario is where you have multiple URL’s that point to the same exact page, e.g. a dynamic site. So those are two times when you have duplicate content within a site. [...]
February 3rd, 2007 at 4:49 pm
[...] Przykład: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank - Przytaczany w poprzednim artykule wywiad z Vanessą Fox z Google przprowadzony przez redaktora SEOmoz.org [...]
February 19th, 2007 at 7:05 am
[...] If you have two identical/similar content pages, both with thousands of authority inbound links, those pages are not supplemental-index-bait. Google’s solution to duplicate content is not the supplemental index. On the contrary, Googlers insist that they filter out duplicate content. [...]
March 5th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
[...] In a WebProNews video, Rand Fishkin interviewed Google’s Vanessa Fox and asked her about text to code ratio point blank. Fusednation has a nice synopsis of our video interview with Vanessa Fox of Google where, among other topics, she addresses text-to-code ratio. [...]
March 14th, 2007 at 5:50 am
[...] Some argue that robots.txt is no longer important, some search engines no longer use, but others still do, and it wont harm to add a robots.txt file and block spiders from indexing unwanted file, you can also block any archive folders from being indexed and risk the penalty of duplicate content, although according to this video on Webpronews Google no longer has a penalty on duplicate content, but others may still do. [...]
March 17th, 2007 at 5:46 am
order ultram
news
March 23rd, 2007 at 2:18 am
[...] Google’s Vanessa Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank ITW video de Vanessa Fox par Rand Fishkin (tags: seo google sitemaps duplicate-content video pagerank) [...]
March 25th, 2007 at 2:47 am
thank for good video
April 12th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
[...] SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank [...]
May 30th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Sure, he had interrupted her at
most interesting moments, especially
at the beginning.
Also at interesting moments, like at 14:58 or 17:01,
when she went to elaborate on the important
details.
Pity.
June 15th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
[...] 10. Vanessa got tired of being stalked by all the odd SEO geeks out there, like the strange man in the long black coat who starts hovering around behind her three-quarters of the way through this video interview between her and Rand. [...]
August 7th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Hello! Help solve the problem.
Very often try to enter the forum, but says that the password is not correct.
Regrettably use of remembering. Give like to be?
Thank you!
September 6th, 2007 at 1:05 am
Are You Sure ?
September 11th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Its wonderful, Sweet!
September 15th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Seo is like a game
October 15th, 2007 at 8:25 am
….One of the hardest to watch web videos I have ever seen. I kept a tally and the video needed to stop and buffer 124 times. That’s an average of about 8 seconds of playback for each chunk. I don’t have a super connection (512k ADSL), but that was ridiculous!
Can’t really comment on the content, it was very hard to absorb through all the buffering….
November 5th, 2007 at 9:24 am
..Google site map is a nightmare to use for me. My site has over 220000 static pages. A new version is over 400000 pages. How do you want to upload that in a file to Google Sitemap?..
December 7th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
[...] just found a video where Vanessa Fox talks about sitemaps: “It’s really not about the ranking; it’s [...]
May 24th, 2008 at 5:43 am
[...] You can watch the interview on WebProNews.com. [...]
May 28th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
[...] You can watch the interview on WebProNews.com. [...]
July 26th, 2008 at 5:06 am
Not a bad video. It’s good to see a whole lot of things cleared up (or, rather, just affirmed). A lot of this many of us new already, but I think it’s good to be reminded of the basics and to have things you thought confirmed by the pros. I think that many people still don’t pay enough attention to this, yet expect for things to maximum SEO’d when they’ve not even taken cognisance of the basics.
July 31st, 2008 at 7:17 pm
[...] Vanessa fox Google’s interview [...]