Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have just announced that they will begin using a standard sitemap protocol. I’ve done a lot of work over the last two years designing various sitemaps, so now that I’ll be able to design one for everybody is a huge benefit to my clients. Not only are these three groups working together but they also decided to use the same standard – that’s a miracle.
Google’s Announcement

Microsoft’s Announcement

Yahoo’s Announcement

Luckily, the format they’ve decided on was previously Google’s, so adapting existing sitemaps to this new protocol will be painless. I’ll be updating my own sitemaps sometime soon – Botsko.net, MySquibbles, etc.

If you’re interested in creating or upgrading your sitemap, please feel free to contact me.

Users of the SCPM3 system will automatically receive a new sitemap generator in the next update.

Yay!

I run ProFTPD on both of my development machines – one is a Mandrake Linux 10.1 box and one is Fedora Core 5. The FC5 machine was recently setup as I needed a devoted PHP5 development machine, but the ftp server was taking up to three seconds per directory to perform an action. I needed to transfer some client code and it took about ten minutes just scan through all of the directories – this was completely unaccpetable.

I was curious as to what the differences were between the two machines – one worked very quickly and one did not. After a bit of a searching I discovered a few tweaks that solved all of the problems:

Adding the following to the config file really sped up the login process:

IdentLookups off
UseReverseDNS off

However, my directory listings were still running slowly. When I added:

AllowOverride off

To the global config file, it told ProFTPD to stop looking for an .ftpaccess file in every single directory.

Once I restarted the server, things were blazing along. All it took were a few minor changes to be back in business!

In the beginning of October, Squibbles was officially one month old. While it’s been difficult attracting the target audience it’s intended for (because they’re parents, not all-day internet users) I knew that an upcoming holiday would mean a lot of those people would be searching the internet for something I could grab a share of.

In the first week or so of October I collected a decent list of Halloween links including links to games, puzzles, recipes, and the obligatory pumpkin carving templates. It quickly entered the Google indexes because every few days the search giant checks out the site map file. A sitemap file is a specially-formatted file that tells a search engine which pages I would like it to index. Obviously, it takes me seriously as every single Squibbles page is now indexed. Squibbles was designed with SEO in mind. The URLs are very clean, the page titles are very unique and descriptive, and for the most part the site has valid xhtml.

On October 23 I saw an excellent increase in the amount of visitors, and I started getting several new user registrations (now the website is still an infant so these numbers are not mind-blowing in anyway, but they hint at what’s to come). I checked out my stats and sure enough Google had become my top referrer. My Halloween feature list was an experiment and it was very short, yet it was already bringing a lot more traffic through than I had anticipated.

This Halloween page was only two weeks old, yet Squibbles was already placing on the first and second pages for searches like “halloween puzzles and quizzes” and “printable pumpkin templates” respectively.

Lessons

The primary lesson is that if you do things the right way, things pay off. I’ve seen the success that a very small feature can bring when I anticipate which searches my target audience will be doing, and then tailor my content to meet those needs. I have an array of holidays coming up that will help me refine this technique. I will make sure I provide a wider selection of links, and I will continue to ensure that my titles are clear, my content is valid, and my site map file is complete.