What is the Quality of your Sitemap.xml file?

by Posted in SEO
 

How important is it to have an accurate, up-to-date sitemap.xml file for search engines?

According to Bing, it is very important.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday at SEOmoz, Duane Forrester of Bing unveiled the idea that Bing has a quality threshold for the sitemap.xml file that a website submits. Duane states that Bing only wants to see “end state URLs” in the sitemap.xml. This declaration provides some insight to those keeping up on their sitemap.xml file.

Do not include URLs of the following nature:url address bar

  • No 404, 302, 301, etc.
  • No rel=”canonical”

This solidifies the importance for your sitemap.xml to be up-to-date and accurate with URL inclusion. Duane didn’t unfold that specifics of what happens to websites with “dirty” sitemap.xml files. He only indicates that a “dirty” sitemap.xml does impact how Bing views your website.

Hey Google, This Site Sucks!

by Posted in General
 

user blockGoogle has released an extension for its Chrome browser that will allow users to block sites in. With the plugin you can block domains/hosts from appearing in your Google search results.

At this point the plugin doesn’t extending blocking any further than a personal level, but we’d be naive to think that Google won’t be watching this data to assist in further developing their search algorithm.  This step towards “edited” content is a page out of the Blekko book of search. Blekko is a new search engine that users human editing to help rank the sites that appear after the search query.

While this is big news, the cat was let out of the bag during the Farsight 2011 conference. Matt Cutts (Google) hinted at this development during his debate with Harry Shum (Bing) about Bing stealing search results from Google.

Does this mean that Google will start using human editing to improve their rankings? I don’t think so. Matt Cutts and those at Google have been pretty adamant about Google continuing on the algorithm path to keep their results impartial and automated. Google will likely use these signals to help improve what their algorithm can do. Matt Cutts recently addressed this thought on Hacker News.

Get the Chrome extension.

Using jQuery: Get Current Year

by Posted in Code
 

Using jQuery to output the current year is a useful substitute when your website pages are done in HTML and not with server side languages like PHP or ASP. The following code demonstrates how to print the current year in HTML using jQuery.

First, you will need to reference a jQuery library in the <head> of your HTML. You can do this one of two ways:

  • Link directly to the jQuery library on the jQuery code site
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  • Download a version of jQuery from the jQuery site (http://jquery.com/) and relatively link to it from within your site
<script src="/script/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

With the jQuery library referenced you can now pull the current year and push it to an HTML element using some jQuery syntax. The below JavaScript grabs the current year and pushes the value to the “text” of the HTML element with the ID of “year”.

<script type="text/javascript">
  var currentYear = (new Date).getFullYear();
  $(document).ready(function() {
  $("#year").text( (new Date).getFullYear() );
  });
</script>

Now we create the HTML element to receive the year value:

<p>Copyright <span id="year">TEXT</span> Company Name - All Rights Reserved.</p>

With this code in place, the year will be pushed to the TEXT position of the “year” span tag when the DOM is ready. This functionality is useful for elements such as copyright dates or other date representations that need to stay current.