Robots.txt and Sitemaps

Last week at the NYC SES Conference it was announced that all 4 major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask) now not only support the sitemaps.org sitemap protocol, but also support the new auto-discovery feature for the robots.txt file!

In order to use the auto-discovery feature, you simply add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://sitemap_location

Example Robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.mcanerin.com/sitemap.gz

I have updated my free Robots.txt Generator so that it will generate this properly for you.

Ian

Back from China

I'm back from China. No, I didn't go on the China Search Marketing Tour without you, and you didn't miss it yet (though if you don't sign up ASAP, you will!). I went on a family vacation. I took my kids, wife, inlaws and an "uncle" I've never met to Beijing, Shanghai, and finally to a small village near Kai-Ping where my wifes family comes from.

Even though they are Chinese, it was the first time any of them had ever been so far north - Uncle (as I called him) had never even seen snow before, so the sub-zero weather of Beijing in March was definately a new experience for him. The trip to the Great Wall was in almost -40 degree weather!

I'll spare you the day by day (I'm planning on inflicted that on you for the CSMT), but there were a couple of highlights:

Never go to Beijing before April - it's cold and no fun. May is MUCH better.

Damn, it's cold!

My wifes village is very interesting, and about as rural as you can get in China while still having electricity...

Looks pretty - Don't drink the water...

Stir Fried Water Beetles and other "interesting" foods are often eaten in villages.

Bugs... Yummy. Taste like unsalted pumpkin seeds.

I have many stories about this trip - some of which I might even tell one day. :)

Ian

Out of Town + Inbox Blues

Hi all,

Sorry I haven't updated this blog for a while, but I went to China for 3 weeks, then had to speak at a conference in Vancouver, then came home to several virtual fires that needed to be put out, not to mention almost 3000 emails in my inbox!

Admittedly, some of those have been there for a long time - I found one I red-flagged (I use Outlook) as critical in oh...2005. Ouch.

I'm very proud of myself - This past week I've managed to cut the number of emails in my inbox from almost 3000 to 11, through a combination of ruthless "do I really need to do this" cuts, sorting into sub folders, a couple of custom junk mail filters, and a bunch of numbingly hard work.

One trick to deal with this volume is to sort by sender, rather than date. Often, you can deal with a dozen issues and emails simply with one email. This also makes it FAR easier to drag entire groups into folders (or to delete them!).

I also went through all the flagged emails and actually *used* the flags properly - Setting everything to red really isn't helpful, and rather defeats the purpose of flagging in the first place, since you will often find yourself red-flagging things that are not critical, but that you just don't want to forget about. This can build up into a monster (as I well know!).

It's hard to imagine the feeling of relief that actually cleaning out your inbox (if you are a habitual inbox filler like me) for the first time in 2 years!

I was so happy I went and actually cleaned my office, too! Someone stop my before I start alphabetizing my socks or something....

Ian