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.”
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71 users commented in " SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank "
[…] Vanessa Fox Clarifies The Role of Google Sitemaps […]
[…] Durante la conferencia SES Chicago 2006, Rand Fishkin, CEO de SEOmoz, ha realizado una entrevista en vÃdeo con Vanessa Fox de Google Webmaster Central. […]
[…] Original video is here. […]
[…] http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ […]
Excellent Interview that answered many of my questions. Keep up the good work.
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.
…
[…] 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. […]
[…] The skinny on sitemaps and page rank from the mouth of Google, aka Vanessa Fox. […]
Really clears up a lot of misconception!
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…
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.
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.
Good interview…just wish he would have let Vanessa talk more instead of interrupting her constantly…especailly at the end.
Vanessa Fox is cute!
Found the pointer to the time stamp & crawl frequency useful. What format is your video - Flash? Like the quality.
Yes agree - far too many interruptions broke up the flow of her comments and added nothing
[…] […]
OAI-PMH = Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
I thought everybody knew that?
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.
I am a relative newcomer to webmaster tools so this will prove very useful
[…] WebProNews opublikowaÅ‚o bardzo dobry film, w którym Rand Fishkin - ekspert SEO (optymalizacji stron dla wyszukiwarek) prowadzi wywiad z VanessÄ… Fox z zespoÅ‚u Google Webmaster Cental. […]
[…] Video of the interview. […]
i thought this was supposed to be video?? i only got the audio!!
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
[…] Watch the video of the interview. […]
[…] 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. […]
I think the article is very help full for the webmaster in general and seo experts in particular .
[…] 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 […]
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…
[…] 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 […]
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.
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…
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…
[…] 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 […]
[…] Why not check it out yourself http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ […]
Vanessa Fox is a real person!!!!
Now can we get her to address the PSS issue?
Morepheus
Rand, your hair looks silly!
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…
Great video…makes sense feel free to find more video tools
at my home url http://webtrafficdaily.com
[…] 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. […]
[…] 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. […]
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.
@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!
This is an excellent video. Nice to hear some info straight from Google…
[…] 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. […]
[…] 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). […]
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”
[…] 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. […]
[…] http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ […]
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?
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
[…] 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. […]
any text transcript ? my english not good.
[…] 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. […]
[…] PrzykÅ‚ad: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank - Przytaczany w poprzednim artykule wywiad z VanessÄ… Fox z Google przprowadzony przez redaktora SEOmoz.org […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] 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. […]
[…] 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. […]
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[…] Google’s Vanessa Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank ITW video de Vanessa Fox par Rand Fishkin (tags: seo google sitemaps duplicate-content video pagerank) […]
thank for good video
[…] SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank […]
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.
[…] 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. […]
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!
Are You Sure ?
Its wonderful, Sweet!
Seo is like a game
….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….
..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?..
[…] just found a video where Vanessa Fox talks about sitemaps: “It’s really not about the ranking; it’s […]
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