Optimize your Blog with Google Sitemaps

WebProNews has an interesting video interviewing Vanessa Fox of Google on optimizing your blog with Sitemaps.

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….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.”

Interestingly she seems to lean towards using our XML (RSS or Atom) newsfeed as her preferred choice for submitting to Google Sitemaps, which is great news for Blogspot users who have no other available options.

She also discusses PageRank in the context of Sitemaps (you will find it under the “Statistics”, “Crawl Stats” menu) and says that getting “relevant” incoming links is more important than the link’s actual pagerank.

Then again, in the grand scheme of things pagerank probably doesn’t amount to a hill of beans for blogspot users anyway (blogspot owns the url and all the more reason to switch over to a hosted solution).

So don’t worry, be happy (but do submit your blog to Sitemaps).

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