Busby SEO Challenge SEM/SEO Tips

If you have used Google’s webmaster tools and using sitemaps for site submissions and pretty much liked it, you will even like it more knowing that Yahoo and MSN are opening their doors to the same sitemap format. This sitemap protocol was announced to be adopted by Yahoo and MSN as well.

For more information about the Sitemaps Protocol, a search engine neutral website sitemaps.org will contain all details on the proper creation of the sitemap XML file.

Although this can be used for submissions for better crawling, having no sitemaps does not mean your website will not be crawled. It will just serve as a guide for faster crawling. And having a sitemap does not also mean higher search engine ranking. It just helps the search engines figure out your pages better than crawling every link on your page.

Are we going to see better site submission tools in the coming months from Yahoo and MSN/live for submitting sitemaps with some reporting just like Google’s webmaster tools?

I know many people in the SEO world will agree that MSN indexes websites the fastest, next is Yahoo and last is Google. Right after you make a website that is totally brand new, with a brand new domain name that has never been online, and you do search engine submissions to Google, Yahoo and MSN, experience has showed us that MSN/Live will index your website in 1 to 2 days. Yahoo will follow afterwards, and last will be Google.

I remember reading Google’s FAQs on crawling during the times the Google sitemaps were not yet created. Google said they crawl the internet once a month. And when it crawls it does not guarantee that your website will be crawled. And I am not sure if this was in late 2004 or early 2005, where I still remember a press release of MSN claiming they crawl the sites faster than Google at a rate of every other day. True enough, yes they did, but Google was still king of relevant results.

Today, with the constant improvement of Google Sitemaps, search engine submission on Google has some added precision to it. Although MSN and Yahoo are indeed still faster in crawling you and indexing your websites, but Google no longer seems to be that far behind. With the Google sitemaps, you can be indexed by Google in less than a week, and a few days does not really matter.

So is  MSN/Live and Yahoo really faster in indexing than Google?

The answer here is when you are just adding a new website to all 3 at the same time, I believe MSN/Live is still faster, next is Yahoo and last is Google. But if we are talking about reindexing, I think the case is totally the other way around.

For several Ituloy AngSulong SEO contest entries, I have been checking the index pages and looking at the cache and taking note of the cache dates. Google seems to be faster and more up-to-date with changes on my website, but Yahoo and MSN seem to take a longer time to update their index. But I guess one reason why Google is faster in this area of reindexing is because of the automated Google sitemaps creation I have along with an automated ping sent to Google sitemaps, a feature Yahoo and MSN does not have.

As reported by several SEO programmers on SEO Philippines, The MSN/Live API has been displaying results not similar to the actual results online. In fact they do not even look similar and are totally different.

Is this a sneak peek of what’s to come on MSN’s ranking results? Or is the API delayed and the actual results are the final results? Some people have decided to either read the MSN/Live RSS feeds or scrape the search results.

I wonder when will MSN/Live make things right?