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Issue #107: Open Sitemaps

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                    SearchReturn Discussion List
             "Understanding Internet Search Technology"
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Moderator:                                          Published by:
Detlev Johnson                                       SearchReturn
               http://www.searchreturn.com
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November 16, 2006                         SearchReturn Issue #107
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                   .....IN THIS DIGEST.....

// -- ESSENTIAL NEWS -- //
            "Sweeping Launch Of Sitemaps Protocol"
            "Q3 Numbers"

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// -- ESSENTIAL NEWS -- //

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==> Sweeping Launch Of Sitemaps Protocol

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061116-000001

Essentials: For those that use Google Sitemaps you'll be
interested to know that the other major engines (save Ask) have
agreed to an open Sitemaps standard.  This is a move that Yahoo!
has called for since Google's initial launch of a proprietary
Sitemaps XML schema.

At the moment, the protocol remains the same as Google's, so
nothing needs changing.  However, the XML namespace for the
standard has officially moved (even in Google's case) from the
proprietary Google resource to an open resource located at the
newly launched www.sitemaps.org website.

This is quite a large and sweeping change that deserves applause
from the webmaster community.  There is now an open protocol for
describing the architecture of your website using XML containers
and a language that is simple for those who know HTML.

We expect each engine will treat the information slightly
differently, however by adopting it as a standard, at least
website owners have the facility to bypass faith in the engines
that they can learn about their content architecture and make
judgments about it entirely by unassisted crawling.

 

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==> Q3 Online Ad Numbers

http://www.searchreturn.com/digest/refs107.shtml

Essentials: The numbers are in and online advertising, of which
search marketing represents generally 40%, reached new highs for
third quarter US spending.  This is the eighth consecutive
quarter of growth for online ad spending.  Although some
corrections to forecasting of online ad spend figures have been
made by the likes of Merrill Lynch recently, this report
continues to cite online ad spending as hovering around 5% of
total advertising spending.  It could start to be reported as
closer to double that amount.

The third quarter numbers show strong growth of which search
remains the driver, and there appears to be plenty of headroom
left.  This news should come as no surprise to practitioners in
the field and is further evidence that Marketing Sherpa (which
reported little growth for search 2006) might not have enough
usable data, or improperly analyzed their numbers before drawing
conclusions that search spending all but stopped in 2006.

 
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