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JohnMu aka Googler John Mueller, confirmed Google’s use of sitemaps on Sunday and suggests using only quality meta data in xml sitemaps.

In his Google Groups post, John Mueller goes on to mention specifics as to how Google uses meta data in xml sitemaps submitted via Google Webmaster Tools :

URL - According to Mueller, it’s best to list only working URLs in xml sitemaps and only the correct version for canonical URLs. For canonical URLs, he suggests providing the “/” version and not “index.html” in his example. He goes on to point out the importance of using the same URL found in the site’s navigation and if necessary to use 301 redirects to that same URL when necessary. The navigation issue if important especially if something other than a crawler creates your sitemap. Either way, it’s worth testing to be sure your Sitemap URLs are identical to those in the user path (I’ve actually had near knock down drag outs over this issue). JohnMu suggest only including URLs to indexable content like (X)HTML pages and other documents. In addition he points out, it’s best to only include URLs webmastes want indexed.

Last modification date - In his post Mueller points out the difficulty Google can have with determining a “Last modification date” for dynamic sites due to their dynamic nature. He suggests either using the correct time or none at all. John suggests using a “Last modification date” but not “Change frequency” unless webmasters can establish a consistent frequency.

Change frequency - Like “Last modification date”, Mueller suggests not using a date/time if the actual one isn’t available.

Priority - Mueller suggests not including “Priority” meta data in xml sitemaps unless webmasters feel they can provide accurate data.

In summary, JohnMu suggests sitemap.org XML files that contain URLs for inclusion in Google’s index and only those found in the site’s navigation. He suggests “Date or change frequency” and “Priority” as optional meta data.

UPDATE: JohnMu has posted additional information over at Search Engine Roundtable in response to Barry’s post.

- beu

A few weeks ago Google launched a new feature intended to provide users with whois data in Google’s main SERPs. By entering a query like “whois google.com” users are returned new whois data including creation and expiration dates in Google’s main results. In addition to the new feature, Google provides users the option for more information via “Whois record for google.com” link which resolves to domaintools.com. After linking directly from Google’s main search results to domaintools.com, users are greeted with various details about the domain including website title, description and even an “SEO Score” provided by domaintoools.com.

After linking from Google’s main SERP to domaintools.com you might notice, there are lots of ads provided by Google. If you look closely, right along side those Google ads you’ll find paid links passing PageRank at domaintools.com. Paid links passing PageRank are a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and grounds for being banned from Google. In this case Google is linking to pages with paid links passing PageRank!

Here is an example using the cached text version of the domaintools.com landing page linked to by Google for the query “whois google.com” http://209.85.165.104/search?…. In it you’ll notice http://vpslink.com… is a paid link passing PageRank. As I mentioned at SearchEngineWatch.com the paid link domain ranks #1 for the keyword term used in it’s ALT anchor text at domaintools.com and linked to by the Google Whois feature.

If you would like more information about paid ads at domaintools.com and have $10k per month, click on the “Sponsor us” link to the right of the Google search box. I’ve not seen many banner ad landing pages with a PR of 6!

- beu

UPDATE: - In response to this post being picked up by blogoscoped.com, Matt Cutts (Head of Google Web Spam Team) confirmed earlier today that DomainTools.com is now in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. DomainTools is now blocking ads with paid links passing PageRank via robots.txt. Sincere and special thanks to Matt, Google and DomainTools.com for swiftly resolving this issue!

- beu

Sites claiming to offer a new, innovative solution for “Flash SEO” called SWFAddress aka “Deep Links”, “Deep Linking” and/or other. Unfortunately, these sites are promoting techniques based on SWFAddress which is a method for Flash SEO that I’ve blogged about, taken the creator to task on and that even he admits, is sub-optimal in terms of SEO!

“The case is valid. Deep links with anchors published on other sites will tell Google to index the start page.”
- Google Groups

Not to worry though because identifying sites using SWFAddress is easy! If a Flash site uses #anchors (a pound sign) in it’s URLs chances are it’s using SWFAddress. The problem with this SWFAddress is that it functions in only one direction, or so to speak.

Google ignores the #anchor in SWFAddress URLs as well as the entire path following the #anchor in URL. When users with Flash cut and paste a link from their address bar into their blog, digg and/or Linkedin, Google ignores everything starting with the #anchor and as a result misallocates keyword relevancy and PageRank to the “start page”.

Some credit where it’s due would have been nice but, either way I commend the good folks at Asual for their efforts as well as the new “COPY LINK TO CLIPBOARD” link in the footer of there SEO sample pages.