Keywords: Find Theirs, Protect Yours

Be the pigeon, not the statue

By WebProNews Staff · May 8, 2008 · 8 Comments

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One clever SEO professional said sitemaps are the keys to the kingdom of well-performing keywords.

That website. You know the one. Top five in the SERPs, while your lame effort sits in eighth place. Eighth? You may as well be rated on a list stuck to the back of a truck driving through Ciudad Juarez at midnight.

As soon as you try to change strategies, that SOB might be right alongside, grabbing keywords and keeping you out of the high placement you deserve. Are you planning to fight back anytime soon, loser?

SEO ROI has a suggestion for you, and it has to do with sitemaps. These documents make it easier for search engines to understand your site’s architecture.

Sitemaps also represent an unlocked safe full of money in front of an open window. Why give away keyword information in those sitemaps when you can protect it with a little effort?

Here

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There are 8 Comments. Add Yours.

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Gab
May 9, 2008 at 1:15 pm

Hi David,

Thanks for the link love and sharing my idea with your readers – much appreciated.

Some people were critical of the folder lock trick, and I responded in the comments with an alternative suggestion. If you must have a link to it that’s "easily findable" for a robot, you can link from your least trafficked page, like the privacy policy. Or you can run through your analytics and find an old post that’s indexed [and therefore still crawled] but gets no traffic and inconspicuously drop the link there.

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Gab
May 9, 2008 at 1:16 pm

By the way, I’d love to add you on MSN messenger. Can you email me your address?

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David Cheong
May 10, 2008 at 2:53 pm

I think it is possible to hide sitemap in deep folder as David mentioned, but my best guess is, some webmaster really can dig it out, David, is there anywhere to prevent this and at the same time, letting crawler(safe) to crawl our sitemap?

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  David A. Utter
  May 12, 2008 at 11:37 am
  
  You can make it difficult to find the sitemap, but ultimately you want the search engines that handle sitemaps to be able to get to them.
  
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Free web proxy
May 18, 2008 at 9:18 am

Thanks for the link love and sharing my idea with your readers – much appreciated.

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Colon Cleansing
December 8, 2008 at 8:02 pm

I am finding Linkscape very helpful for determining both backlink counts as well as data on the backlink keywords webmasters are using for their websites.

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internet marketing indonesia
December 21, 2008 at 11:17 pm

thanks for your article about Keywords: Find Theirs, Protect Yours.

One clever SEO professional said sitemaps are the keys to the kingdom of well-performing keywords.

That website. You know the one. Top five in the SERPs, while your lame effort sits in eighth place. Eighth? You may as well be rated on a list stuck to the back of a truck driving through Ciudad Juarez at midnight.

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dentista especialista
January 9, 2009 at 7:39 am

In my opinion, clever SEOs are those one that are worried about Convertion an Traffic!

Thanks!

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