Page 37 - volume-12-3

change and send information to search Spammer Activity Affecting
engines. As all activity on a website is Millions Of Sites
cataloged and categorized by spiders, any
activity that is associated with a site drives it Spammer activity on these submissions
higher in search engine rankings. Simply put, a is done with the intention to add links back
sitemap is the ultimate way to make changes to their own websites or to misguided and
to a website and organize it in such a way that false offers. All of this is done to attain higher
your efforts are leveraged to produce more rankings to those websites. All of these
visibility in less time. attempts to build backlinks are not legitimate
SEO tactics, and they are considered poor
Benefits of Sitemaps form by Google, as they are regarded as
dishonest attempts to trick users and search
Several advantages exist with building
engines by misdirecting traffic.
sitemaps for a website. Some of these
benefits include:
When these anonymous submissions were
working correctly, Bing allowed website users
� Clear intention and themes to help
maintain a site’s organizational integrity to submit sitemaps anonymously through the
use of an HTTP request. Now that activity
� Reduction of broken links, allowing for is no longer supported, and Microsoft is
problems to be fixed in a timely manner eliminating the option to anonymously submit
sitemaps.
� Clear channels for conversion--navigating
sites is easier with more organized means What now?
of “click and go” technologies
Those who still wish to submit sitemaps
� Activity is tracked and logged for greater to Google have the option to use robots.txt
visibility
on a specific domain name or use Bing web
tools to do so. Microsoft issued a statement
� Better visibility for new businesses trying
shortly after the decision to pull HTTP request
to create clear traffic channels
options, stating,
� Time saving technology that leverages
your efforts to yield better results “We continue to recommend having
sitemaps containing all relevant URLs
� Better communication among teams hosted on your web sites and refreshing
related to website development those once per day. Trusted ways to inform
search engines include Robots.txt and Bing
webmaster tools.”
Use of data revealed through sitemaps,
Despite the inconvenience, millions of web
such as coding errors, traffic origin, and
designers are making the switch to the tighter
strategic use of keywords will allow for
protocol, as they see the clear advantages of
improvement of content and drive additional
driving spammer activity out of the picture.
traffic to a website. A high quality website
This small deviation in standard practice is
is rarely built without the strategic use of
unlikely to change the face of current web
different teams who all work to define a
central goal, action plan, and outcome. business, and we look forward to seeing how
Sitemaps serve as an effective central hub for this will benefit web developers and business
tracking a project, revealing what has been owners in the coming months as they conduct
completed, what needs improvement, and the their integral practices with an added measure
progress that is being made with each change. of security.

PAYOUTMAGAZINE 37