Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
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Google
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog (325 unread)
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Emily Chang (347 unread)
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Search Engine Roundtable
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Search Engine Roundtable (4 unread)
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Daily Search Forum Recap: October 11, 2010
Posted: October 11th, 2010, 11:00pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Search Forum Recap
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Why Google May Not Find Your Sitemap File
Posted: October 11th, 2010, 3:53pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
I'll be honest, I am pretty technical, but I simply do not fully understand the issue here.
Franz Enzenhofer posted a thread at Google Webmaster Help claiming Google cannot access his XML Sitemap no matter what he does. After much debugging and testing, he wrote a blog post explaining why he and maybe your servers won't serve up your XML sitemap file to Google.
He wasn't able to see a GET request by Google, so he dug even deeper and noticed an issue at the TCP/IP level. He said, and I quote:
- You realize that googlebot makes multiple (we counted up to 11) GET requests in one single TCP/IP connection. (which is OK according to the HTTTP 1.1 spec).
- You realize (with the help of stackoverflow) that these multiple GET requests in the some TCP/IP connection are processed in sequence (one after the other).
- You realize that if one these GET requests has a major time lag (is much slower than the other GET requests) Google cuts the TCP/IP connection.
- Because all the GET requests in the connection were processed in sequence, all the GET requests after the cut are lost. You don’t see them in the error/access logs as they were never processed, even though they were sent.
- You see an error in Google Webmaster Tools, without a trace in your logfiles.
Google's Matt Cutts commented on the blog post saying, "Interesting--good find." He didn't necessarily confirm this is a Google bug but JohnMu commented in the Google Webmaster Help thread implying that GoogleBot is stopping after some time due to his server speed? At least I think that is what he is saying:
It looks like you were busy while I was out of town :). Yes, this error can mean that we did not even try to fetch the Sitemap file from your server. If we recently picked up some of the Sitemap files again, I assume this is likely just a coincidence. With your site, we'd likely need to crawl with more than 10 QPS (the maximum manual setting in the crawl rate tool); by changing it to "Let Google determine my crawl rate (recommended)" our systems would be able to do that if they're able to determine that your server can handle it.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Don't Use Pipes In Your URLS | Says Google
Posted: October 11th, 2010, 3:43pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
A Google Webmaster Help thread has one webmaster asking if it is a bad idea to use pipes in the URL. A pipe is this: |. They asked if it is a bad idea to use it in your URL, such as www.seroundtable.com/my|awesome|page.html.
He said when he plugged in a URL with a pipe in it using the Google Keyword Tool, Google return an "invalid website" error response.
Google's JohnMu said he doesn't recommend you use the pipe. He said:
We'll generally crawl and index any accessible and valid URL, I'm sure you'll find many URLs with "pipe" characters in it in our index. That said, just because it's possible doesn't necessarily make it a good idea :-). Similar to using spaces in URLs, those characters may cause issues elsewhere, so personally, I'd try to minimize the risk of problems anywhere by avoiding those kinds of URLs.
Just so you know, an inurl:| search does not return any results:
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
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Google Improves Parameter Handling For Faceted Navigation Control
Posted: October 11th, 2010, 3:32pm CEST by rustybrick
Tags: Google Optimization
About a week ago, we reported on the new percentage change reporting in the Google Webmaster Tools query report. As a side note to that, I mentioned the parameter handeling feature was moved to a new section. I did not notice that new features were added to the parameter handeling tool.
Google wrote about the changes and explained what is new for parameter handling. Google is basically giving us more control over SEO issues with faceted navigation and more. Google said:
You now have the ability to choose a specific value among the known values for a given URL parameter. This is important when a parameter is relevant to the content, but different values of this parameter lead to similar pages. For example, consider a sorting parameter, like “sort-by” in the following URLs:
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=2
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=2These four URLs show products in the candy category. There are enough items in this category to fill two pages, and the products shown can be sorted by price, in ascending or descending order. Selecting action “Ignore” for parameter “sort-by” would be incorrect and could potentially limit our indexing of the site. This is because, after ignoring “sort-by”, we would consider the first two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with ascending sort order. We would also consider the last two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with descending sort order. In this scenario, we would be indexing the candy category inconsistently, with some candy products appearing in both of the pages selected for the index, while other candy products not appearing in either of them. The right solution comes from the new action “Use specific value” now available in Webmaster Tools. To avoid duplicates but still keep our indexing consistent, you can simply select action “Use specific value” for parameter “sort-by” and choose one of the valid values, say “asc-price”. After this, our indexing would be fully consistent, as we would focus only on the pages with products sorted by ascending price.
Here is a picture:
Vanessa Fox wrote about it at Search Engine Land and Tedster said in a WebmasterWorldthread, "I find this to be a thoughtful addition to the box of tricks offered in Webmaster Tools."
Forum discussion at Sphinn & WebmasterWorld.