The Infrastructure Product Manager of Ask.com, Vivek Pathak talked with WebProNews at the Search Engine Strategies 2007 Conference in Chicago. Pathak gives the audience a deeper look into sitemaps. He also gives tips as to how to improve your sitemap and tells us what Ask.com is doing to improve the overall user experience. For details of the interview with Kara Ratliff and Pathak and other information from SES Chicago 2007, stay tuned to WebProNews.

WebProNews talked with the Manager of Natural Search at DoubleClicks Performics, Jeremy Clem at the Search Engine Strategies 2007 Conference in Chicago. Clem gives us his perspective of sitemaps and the future of sitemaps with the search engines. He also talks with us about the option of creating a system for trusted sitemaps. For more details of the interview with Kara Ratliff and Clem, or for more information on SES Chicago, keep watching WebProNews.

WebProNews Reporter Kara Ratliff talked with Editor of SearchEngineLand.com, Danny Sullivan at the Search Engine Strategies 2007 Conference in Chicago. He gives us his perspective of the conference and describes the sessions he thought to be very helpful and informational. He also talks about a controversy discussed in a session about sitemaps. He gave us an insight to his series of SMX conferences in the next year. For more details and information from Danny and SES Chicago 2007, keep watching WebProNews.

SEOmoz.org’s Rand Fishkin recently blogged about sitemaps. Sitemaps sit on your server and assist search engine spiders to crawl and index your site. Fishkin believes sitemaps may hurt your SEO efforts. SEO personalities RustyBrick and David Naylor support Fishkin on this concern. Google’s Central Product Manager Vanessa Fox does not consider sitemaps to be a hinderance.

“There’s no difference in indexing based on how we found a page.”

Fox advises going along with the rules, such as making sure webmasters have a crawlable site, that’s well linked, and has excellent exclusive subject matter.

“You know, links to your site, internal links, make sure we can access and crawl the pages, make sure the content is unique and valuable, and know there’s a lot of things that go into it. We’re not just going to take the sitemap and index all these pages, no matter what they are, just because you submitted a sitemap. I mean, clearly. But, why not do both things, because a sitemap will add to, there’s a couple of times when a sitemap is particularly valuable.”

Fox feels a sitemap doesn’t take the place of those features, but works as an extra tool for webmasters.
Fox included that a sitemap may make it easier for webmasters to find problems in their sites.

“If the site has pages with errors that prevent us from crawling, the pages won’t appear in the index and those pages will be listed in the Crawl Errors section of Webmaster tools. We may not have attempted to crawl some of these pages if they weren’t in the Sitemap, so in this case, a Webmaster might be alerted to problems not otherwise known.”

Fox looks forward to future advancements to allow webmasters know about more problems. Fox thinks Sitemaps enable webmasters to get a complete look at their site.

“A sitemap is a way for you to say here is every single page on my site, here’s a comprehensive view. And, that helps us out, and it helps the site out.”

Fishkin doesn’t believe that sitemaps help.

“The data you get from the natural crawl IS valuable, and submitting an XML feed (or any other format) can cause that natural process of inclusion to be lost. If a page isn’t accessible, doesn’t carry enough link juice, or lacks unique, valuable content, I want to know about it, and the Sitemaps process can be a hindrance.”

Fishkin still believes sitemaps cause obstacles that stand in the SEO’s way.

Our PubCon coverage continues from Las Vegas with this special report.

In an exclusive video interview with WebProNews Yahoo and Google announced a collaborative site called sitemaps.org. Tim Mayer states in the video, “This is something we are announcing tonight at around 9 PM tonight (Las Vegas) Google and Yahoo have gotten together to provide webmasters and publishers a unified way to send their content … let our search engines know about new and existing content.”

Vanessa Fox of Google added, “So we are launching a new site, Sitemaps.org and that will be jointly supported by Yahoo and Google and it will have the sitemaps protocol there. Over time as we evolve it as sort of a collaborative effort all of the information will be there. We are really hoping that this will help webmasters to have an open standard and make it much easier so that they don’t have to worry about one type of feed for one engine and another type of feed for another engine.”
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There are certain partnerships you cannot ignore and if Google and Yahoo are involved, jointly, then most of the free world will take notice. With that in mind, Tim Mayer of Yahoo and Vanessa Fox of Google have announced, exclusively to WebProNews, they have combined forces to launch Sitemaps.org. This service gives webmasters and siteowners a sitemaps.org tool that will be usable by all the search engines willing to participate.

Not only are Google and Yahoo collaborating on this project, they’ve also issued an open invitation to the other search engines willing to join. Microsoft accepted that invitation and will jointly support Sitemaps.org and its efforts.