A ranking change has just occurred on Yahoo between one of my sites and another. The only physical change I can detect to the web site is the line shown below. Can someone explain to me what this line is all about, and could it possibly had an effect on rankings?
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teammatt3 posted this at 21:59—18th June 2007.
He has: 1,836 posts
Joined: Sep 2003
Your webmaster probably had to add that line to verify ownership of the website so he could use some of the tools in Google's Webmaster Central.
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123456A posted this at 22:54—18th June 2007.
They have: 20 posts
Joined: Aug 2000
Can you enlighten me on "Google's Webmaster Central"? I've not heard of that before. I'm trying to understand how this web site out performs mine for placement on Google when the page doesn't even have the search words on it's page (other than in the HTML tags which were not supposed to have much weight), let alone some of the other key elements for SEO. So I'm wondering if it's now possible to pay for placement (other than sponsor links)? The only other thing I can figure is that Google is re-indexing and the results will change as things settle in.
JeevesBond posted this at 01:24—19th June 2007.
He has: 3,491 posts
Joined: Jun 2002
They've got all sorts of tools for Webmasters over there. It's at: http://www.google.com/webmasters/ the bit you'll be interested in is sitemaps, this is probably the reason he's ranking better than you. All major search engines are starting to use the Google sitemap format as a way to submit content.
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123456A posted this at 03:17—19th June 2007.
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teammatt3, I am the webmaster for my web pages, and I didn't add the line above. It was added to the site that is coming in above me now.
tomuchcash posted this at 03:06—6th July 2007.
She has: 71 posts
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cool thanx for info, helps me too
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123456A posted this at 03:30—6th July 2007.
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Well no one seems to know what the line of programing does. Now a second site has gotten ahead of me and using a very similarly coded line, with no other changes or techniques employed. I'm convinced it (this line) has something to do with the better positioning but I don't know how it does this.
teammatt3 posted this at 03:48—19th June 2007.
He has: 1,836 posts
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Oh, I misread your post. Like JeevesBond said, submit your sitemap to Google. If that's all your competitor did, maybe if you do it, you'll be on top of the SERPs again. I haven't been in there for a while, but make sure you check out their reports. You can see if your pages are getting indexed properly, if robots.txt is giving them any problems, and it tells you the last time your site was indexed. They also have a better backlink viewing tool since the link:domain.com command doesn't work very well anymore.
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JeevesBond posted this at 16:55—6th July 2007.
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We just told you! It's a line for the Google Maps application. By putting that line into your code Google can verify you own the domain.
Once Google has confirmed you own the domain it'll let you create and submit sitemaps, these help it find everything on your site. Sorry if that wasn't clear in our original descriptions of what this is for.
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123456A posted this at 06:29—7th July 2007.
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Jeeves, I owe you the apology! I did not understand what you guys were saying. If I understand correctly now, you're telling me that I need to "submit my sitemap to Google" and that will result in the line of code being generated like the one above that I will then paste into my page, is that correct? By sitemap, were talking about a page on my site that lists all the links within the web site? And where exactly would I submit it? Thanks in advance for your patience with a novice......
JeevesBond posted this at 08:20—7th July 2007.
He has: 3,491 posts
Joined: Jun 2002
Hehehe, no problem, just a misunderstanding.
Spot on, correct.
Well, sort of. It's a page on your site that lists all the links within the website using an XML format. If you have a small number of pages you could use something like this online generator. Or search Google for: 'create your own google sitemap' to just write your own one out.
You need to create a Webmaster Tools account with Google (although I think you can probably log on with something like a GMail account), this is the sitemaps page where you can do that: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/.
Am pretty sure the site maps page will take you through the process of verifying you own the site, then you can add site maps to it!
Let us know if you get stuck at any point of course.
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borntorun posted this at 10:58—6th September 2007.
They have: 18 posts
Joined: Sep 2007
cool thread, cheers for the info