UK national newspapers neglecting sitemaps for better search indexing

UK newspaper websites are not implementing standard protocols supported by search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

According to blogger and internet consultant Martin Belam, only two of the UK’s national newspapers use sitemap.xml
- a feature which lists all pages a given site wants to be indexed by a search engine.

And the winners are: The Daily Mail, which has sitemaps for individiual sections of the website; and The Scotsman, which has one central sitemap for all pages.

As Journalism.co.uk reported last month, TimesOnline and The Independent are the only UK national titles to support the ACAP protocol. They’ve made their choice - unsupported by the search giants - and so have the Mail and Scotsman, but what are the other paper’s doing to improve indexing of their content?

Tags: ACAP protocol, given site, google, Journalism.co.uk, Martin Belam, search engine, search engines, search giants, search indexing, The Scotsman, United Kingdom, Yahoo

Publishers’ vertical search can rival Google, says AOP forum

The potential of vertical search engines to wrestle web traffic away from search giants like Google was a topic of debate at yesterday’s AOP forum.

The nature of vertical search, according to the speakers, points readers towards hand-pick sources and presents results in a more dynamic and user-friendly way than the major search engines.

These could be key advantages in the battle to reclaim web traffic from Google and its contemporaries, according to speakers Jonny Orange, media and publishing account manager at Endeca, Simon Baptiste, strategic product manager at FAST, and Daniel Pollock, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell Inc., in the audio below.

While agreeing that publishers can ally against Google and other search engines by denying them access to content - see clip below - Graeme McCracken, chief operating officer for Reed Business Search, said Google should be seen as both a challenge and an opportunity for publishers.

McCracken also announced that RB’s B2B vertical search engine had attracted 350,000 unique users over the last month.

Tags: business to business, Daniel Pollock, Endeca, google, Graeme McCracken, Outsell Inc., Publishers vertical search, Reed Business, search engine, search engines, search giants, Simon Baptiste, web traffic