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Using sitemaps for big three G-Y-M
All the three search engine Google, Yahoo and MSN has provided webmaster
with there own way of submitting XML or text based sitemaps for better
indexing of websites and also provide them with webmaster tools for better
performance over search engines. In this article I would tell about sitemap
formats, how to submit sitemaps and webmaster tools provided by all three
major search engines.
1. Google XML sitemaps and webmaster central
tools: Google webmaster central allows you to submit XML sitemap
and also provides you detailed information on how google view your site.
You can check format for XML sitemaps at www.sitemaps.org or check Theseomarketing.com
XML sitemap. After creating XML sitemap you
need to login with your google account to http://www.google.com/webmasters
and verify your site. Verification is basically to acknowledge that you
are the actual owner of the site. Verification can be done in two ways
either you can add given meta tag to your site or upload a verification
file.
Once verification is done you have full access to webmaster central dashboard
where you can have access to advanced features such as:
a) Settings: Using this tool you can
provide google about information and preferences like geographic targeting,
preferred domain (www or without www), image labeling option and google
crawl rates etc.
b) Diagnostic: Here you can check crawling errors, content
analysis (Problems related to Meta data) and mobile crawl errors.
c) Statistics: Statistics provides you with data such
as top search queries, google crawl and index stats, google feed subscriber
stats etc.
d) Links: Here you can control which pages of your website
to include in google sitel
e) Tools: Tools provide you with ability to create enhanced
404 pages, analyze robots.txt, remove URLs, and manage site verification
and various other gadgets you can use.
2. Yahoo Site Explorer tool: Yahoo site explorer allows
you to add yahoo text sitemap. Yahoo text sitemap is basically in .txt
format with all the pages of the website included. Once you have created
and uploaded your yahoo text sitemap login
at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com with yahoo id and submit your
sitemap. Verification method in yahoo is also the same as that of google.
After verification yahoo site explorer provides you with following features:
a) My sites: Here you can control sites you have added
and explore yahoo saturation and backlinks for the sites.
b) Summary: Here you can see summary of your website
submission like submission status like verification, number of users,
number of feeds etc.
c) Statistics: Here you can check total crawled pages,
hosts and domains that are used in internal and external links to your
domain.
d) Crawl errors: Crawl errors related
to your domain (if any) are displayed here.
e) Actions: remove urls and manage dynamic urls
3. MSN: MSN don’t have any particular sitemap
format yet, however you can submit you site map at http://webmaster.live.com/
. Here you can specify your website and location of your html
sitemap. Another way of submitting sitemap to MSN is add sitemap to
the robots.txt file for your website.
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