richADZ's Site Build It! - Profitable Web Business or Bust

Sitemaps was started by Google, adopted by Yahoo! (after their false start with a text "Site Feed"), and MSN Windows Live (previously known as MSN Search) and Ask.com have recently announced that they are now on board with the Sitemaps XML protocol. You only need to add the required line of code to all robots.txt files.

Ask.com, usually the slowest to index web sites, now has a submission protocol, where they can know about it when you submit your file. Basically, you won't have to wait around for them to discover you anymore.

MSN will actually only introduce their Sitemaps XML protocol before end of year (so they said), but they are already doing a pretty good job of indexing web sites without it.

Now, for the robots.txt files, If you're geeky, you may have not much of a problem -- but if you are not really sure you know what to do (or how to add the correct codes), you could cause yourself more grief than good.

Thank goodness, I don't have to worry about that techie part as Site Build It! takes care of this - at least for my SBI! site.

Furthermore, things are going to change at SBI! (according to Ken Evoy) to take maximal advantage of Sitemaps now that we know how Windows Live and Ask.com are going to participate. For example, take one of SBI! auto submission tool, "Priority Submit"...

Let's say one of my pages gets dropped, the Search Engine HQ (one of the module in SBI!) will let me know, of course, but now the help will suggest that I improve the page, update it, etc., so that the engines will see it's been modified.

Then, when I submit the page (by clicking "Priority Submit)", SBI! will increase the importance of that page slightly in your Sitemaps file to increase the chances of getting it re-indexed.

As the Web changes, so, too does SBI!. Their goal is seemingly always to keep the techie stuff in the background so I can simply focus on doing business.

I can't say the same about my my non-SBI! site, which was developed in the 1990s using Web 1.0. That's why I'm spending a little bit more time there to change all the techie stuff to make it more up-to-date with today's web technology environment.

Suffice to say..., it will take me I guess 5 times more work than for my SBI! site.