A search engine list protocol

No matter what you do for search engine optimization, if the search engines never come a-crawling, it can't help you. Ideally, of course, all of your pages would be referenced in at least one index page, and the search engines would find that and work their way through your site from that. That's a clumsy method though, so both Google and Yahoo have ways for you to tell them about your pages more directly.

For Yahoo, it's just a simple list of files. For this site, a partial look at that is:

 http://aplawrence.com/influencing-google.html
 http://aplawrence.com/seo-firms.html
 http://aplawrence.com/popularity-vs-volume.html
 http://aplawrence.com/what-is-tabbed-browsing.html
 http://aplawrence.com/index.html
 http://aplawrence.com/retirement-blogger.html
 .. etc.
 
 

You can leave it as a plain text file or compress it with gzip. Submit it to Yahoo at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request.

Google has its much more complex Site Map File. This contains much more information; here's a small section of it from here:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
 <url>
       <loc>http://aplawrence.com/influencing-google.html</loc>
       <lastmod>2005-09-02</lastmod>
       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
       <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
 <url>
       <loc>http://aplawrence.com/seo-firms.html</loc>
       <lastmod>2005-09-07</lastmod>
       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
       <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
 <url>
       <loc>http://aplawrence.com/popularity-vs-volume.html</loc>
       <lastmod>2005-09-11</lastmod>
       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
       <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
 
 

Google provides a page where you can resubmit site maps and where they show you any errors such as pages you listed that don't actually exist. The same page also shows any errors from ordinary site crawling. Yahoo has nothing like that.

Google automatically returns and picks up updated sitemaps; you don't seem to need to tell them you've updated though I suppose it can't hurt. Yahoo, on the other hand, doesn't seem to do this without being told. In my opinion, that's just one of the reasons why Google is a better search engine than Yahoo.

It would be nice if we had a open protocol that all the search engines could use. I'd say Google's site maps is a good starting point, though I think that could use some extensions such as webmaster suggested keywords. Nothing stops other search engines from looking for sitemaps, but there's nothing to tell them where to look, so we also need something in the headers of our pages to help them find it. We do that for rss files now; all of my pages include something like this:

 <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://aplawrence.com/aplawrence.rss"
 title="RSS feed for aplawrence.com"/>
 
 

The same thing could be done for sitemaps, which would let all search engines get concise and (hopefully) accurate information about your pages.

Microsoft Bing also accepts sitemaps.

See Getting your pages indexed and Google Sitemaps also.

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