One sitemap to rule them all? After today, the question will be “why not?”

The Yahoo Search blog announced an update to sitemaps during the SMX West event. Along with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo disclosed a new feature for cross-host support for sitemaps.

“To ensure validity of this metadata, Sitemaps have previously been required to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contain,” Yahoo Search noted. “This requirement forced the Sitemaps files to be hosted on the same servers as the actual site content.”

With the change, the sitemap may be hosted on a different host, with the ability to support multiple sites on separate hosts. Webmasters will need to add a line to their robots.txt file to direct crawlers to the differently-hosted sitemap.

The official Sitemaps FAQ has been updated to reflect the support for separately hosted sitemaps.

Yahoo Search cited a couple of concerns from webmasters that led to this latest update. Webmasters wanted to be able to keep user-facing content separate from feeds, as well as the ability to manage a number of websites from one sitemap.

“We hope this enhancement helps address those needs,” the announcement said.

Liron thinks he has beaten everyone to the punch when it comes to creating video sitemaps. His Google Video Sitemap Generator for Windows and Mac platforms takes webmasters through a three step process to build one for posted videos.

In an email, Liron said he quickly got fed up hand-coding the XML for video sitemaps after Google announced their support for the new protocol. That led to him crafting the Generator, currently in version 1.0 with new tweaks promised soon.

Google announced video sitemap support shortly before Christmas. Their extension of the Sitemap protocol lets webmasters submit all video files and relevant metadata to Google in one file.

The base Sitemap protocol enables webmasters to enhance the quality of the indexing search engines that follow the protocol can perform. Unlike the base protocol, only Google supports the video extension presently.

Sitemaps should appeal to the early adopters among those webmasters who publish videos. If Google is having an easier time finding videos when the new Sitemap protocol is in use, no one will want to lag behind the competition in adopting it themselves.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/google-video-sitemaps-generator-released-2007-12/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/whispers-emerge-of-a-torrent-free-future-2007-10 http://www.webpronews.com/whispers-emerge-of-a-torrent-free-future-2007-10#comments Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:42:04 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=41524 Closing up parts of the BitTorrent protocol may have been a necessary business decision by Bram Cohen and company, but it’s motivated the people behind The Pirate Bay to start working on a new protocol to replace torrents.

TorrentFreak frets that they would have to change their name should a new P2P protocol emerge, and supplant the torrents we all know and love.

Love may be too strong a word. Tolerate, especially when it comes to finding those last rare bits of files that take hours or longer to locate, describes it better.

Closing off some of BitTorrent’s inner workings made The Pirate Bay fear that the open protocol has become too closed, and too subject to one firm’s control. They want to develop a new protocol that does away with problems that exist today, TorrentFreak said:

Another reason for a new and improved protocol is the massive number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations that abuse the BitTorrent protocol, either to make money or to bust people who download infringing material. The new protocol will be designed with these potential problems in mind.

We have a suggestion for the protocol developers. The rare bit problem stinks, more than spammers, more than people who upload fake files. As horrifying as the P2P crowd will find the suggestion, Microsoft has reportedly figured out a way around this problem with their Avalanche project:

Avalanche’s improvement begins at the server where the file is first placed. Pieces of the file get encoded with an algorithm. The effect of that encoding allows each piece to know about the other pieces. Once a user collects enough encoded pieces, the file can be recreated.

No more rare bits frustrating file sharing. That would be a real improvement over BitTorrent.

He has followed that up with a full-fledged post on the official Google blog about the new tag. The unavailable_after META tag informs the Googlebot when a page should be removed from Google’s search results:

This information is treated as a removal request: it will take about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. We currently only support unavailable_after for Google web search results.

After the removal, the page stops showing in Google search results but it is not removed from our system.

Fully removing something from Google still requires the URL removal tool, found as one of Google’s Webmaster Central tools.

Google also extended some control over assets beyond web pages to webmasters. Those who publish PDF, audio, video, or other file types can direct the crawler on how Google should manage access to them from its index.

“We’ve extended our support for META tags so they can now be associated with any file,” said Crow. “Simply add any supported META tag to a new X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP Header used to serve the file.”

Supported META tags include options like noarchive, nosnippet, noindex, and unavailable_after. Google sees these as offering enough flexibility to satisfy site publishers; we imagine they have organizations like AFP and Copiepresse in mind here.

SES: Search Supports Sitemaps Autodiscovery

It’s called autodiscovery, and those search engines, along with IBM, have embraced the sitemaps concept wholeheartedly. Webmasters can now place the location of their sitemaps inside a robots.txt file, where crawlers will find it proactively.

That saves some effort where webmasters had to submit sitemaps manually as they made changes to their site architectures. Ask.com recently added submission support for sitemaps, and their Infrastructure Product Manager, Vivek Pathak, will talk more about the subject as part of a morning session during today’s SES New York conference proceedings.

Ahead of that session, Pathak discussed sitemaps at Ask’s blog:

Comprehensiveness and freshness are key initiatives for every search engine, and with autodiscovery of sitemaps, everyone wins:

• Webmasters save time with the ability to universally submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers
• The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important
• Searchers benefit from improved search experience with better comprehensiveness and freshness

Of course, neither autodiscovery nor manual submission guarantee pages will be added to the index. The pages must meet our quality criteria for inclusion in the index. And use of these submission methods does not influence ranking.

Sitemaps as a protocol gained a boost when Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo supported it openly in November 2006 at Sitemaps.org. Its utility gained approval and usage from a number of webmasters, and this latest development should enhance that appeal.

At the session, Google’s Vanessa Fox noted Sitemaps.org will be available in many international languages.

It imparted important details to the web publishers about how they can control indexing and accessing of sites by search engines and Google itself. The important tool for the same purpose is the robots.txt file. Robots.txt file gives powerful control to site owners on how the site is searched.

The more recent post on robots exclusion protocol provides more details and examples of mechanisms to control access and indexing of your website by Google.

This post simplifies the procedure of preventing Googlebot from following a link. “Usually when the Googlebot finds a page, it reads all the links on that page and then fetches those pages and indexes them. This is the basic process by which Googlebot "crawls" the web. This is useful as it allows Google to include all the pages on your site, as long as they are linked together.” It further says that one can add the NOFOLLOW tag to a  page which tells the Googlebot not to follow any links it finds on that page.

Further on, the post intricately explains how to control caching and snippets. “Usually you want Google to display both the snippet and the cached link. However, there are some cases where you might want to disable one or both of these. For example, say you were a newspaper publisher, and you have a page whose content changes several times a day. It may take longer than a day for us to reindex a page, so users may have access to a cached copy of the page that is not the same as the one currently on your site. In this case, you probably don’t want the cached link appearing in our results."

To know more on how robots exclusion protocol can assist read the complete post.

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However, the confusion that has lately prevailed is where to submit the sitemaps file for MSN. There is no parallel to Google Sitamps or Yahoo! Site Explorer for MSN so far. Last week Ken Moss, General Manager, Live Search had said that:

We are 100% behind this protocol – this kind of collaboration will help improve the search experience for all of our customers, and we are working hard to release full support in 2007. We are starting to alpha test with internal partners such as MSDN and Microsoft Support now.

Is that what Microsoft has in mind: 2007?

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It is a 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) signaling protocol. It is one of the major signaling protocols used in Voice over IP (VoIP).

SIP was developed by IETF MMUSIC Working Group in an initiative to create a more robust standard compared to the H.323, which is a current widely used standard for voice sessions. The need was to cater to the increasing demand put by services such as video conferencing, unified messaging, and voice chatting, which are now being implemented through Internet.

SIP is based on Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It basically deals with embedding call setup and signaling features in networking elements such as user agents and proxy servers. The signaling and call setup can be used by IP-based communication system to support the call processing functions and features present in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). SIP enables a VoIP application to have the same kind of high quality and reliability that traditional telephone systems can deliver. SIP adds quality and reliability to VoIP, which until recently has been associated with the term “low cost alternative”.

SIP handles the signaling part of a communication session. It serves as a carrier for the Session Description Protocol (SDP). SDP handles the media portion of the session. The transmission of voice and video content are done by the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). A SIP session thus involves packet streams of RTP. SIP is a part of the protocols involved in a multimedia session.

The major advantage of SIP is in its support for both IP and conventional telephone communication. Communication service providers can leverage on this protocol to interconnect conventional telephone and IP communication services. This especially sounds good for the vendors of VoIP telephony, wherein both the domains are involved. Owing to SIP’s roots in HTTP, voice based application can also be seamlessly integrated with web services.

SIP is scalable, easy to implement, and requires less setup time than its predecessor protocols. Being text based, it is easy to program. It is a peer-to-peer protocol, requiring no implementation in the network level. The logic is implemented at the communication endpoints, which may be in hardware or software level. Real time sessions are established when and where required. Since SIP can be used to modify any session in progress, a normal telephone call session can be converted into a multi-party videoconference. Users can join in the session no matter what kind of terminal he is using or where he is located. The other person may be logged on to Internet through a PC, or may be traveling with a cell phone.

SIP holds lot of promise in today and tomorrow’s communication world. It has been established as a standard for call control and signaling on 3G cell phone networks by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This means that all multimedia and IP voice call signaling will be done through SIP. New services involving fixed network IP services can thus introduced with ease.

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This article has been published by AccessDirect, a leading service provider of PBX phone systems (hosted/virtual). We also provide voicemail, fax mail, follow me call forwarding, local phone numbers, and toll free numbers. Visit us at www.messagingservice.com.

John K represents AccessDirect, a leading provider of Hosted PBX, voice mail, fax mail, local phone numbers, and toll free numbers.

To help you review these important concepts, heres a quick look at the basics of RIPv1, RIPv2, IGRP, and EIGRP.

RIPv1: Broadcasts updates every 30 seconds to the address 255.255.255.255. RIPv1 is a classful protocol, and it does not recognize VLSM, nor does it carry subnet masking information in its routing updates.

Update contains entire RIP routing table. Uses Bellman-Ford algorithm. Allows equal-cost load-balancing by default. Max hop count is 15. Does not support clear-text or MD5 authentication of routing updates. Updates carry 25 routes maximum.

RIPv2: Multicasts updates every 30 seconds to the address 224.0.0.9. RIPv2 is a classless protocol, allowing the use of subnet masks.

Update contains entire RIP routing table. Uses Bellman-Ford algorithm. Allows equal-cost load-balancing by default. Max hop count is 15. Supports clear-text and MD5 authentication of routing updates. Updates carry 25 routes maximum.

IGRP: Broadcasts updates every 90 seconds to the address 255.255.255.255. IGRP is a Cisco-proprietary protocol, and is also a classful protocol and does not recognize subnet masking.

Update contains entire routing table. Uses Bellman-Ford algorithm. Equal-cost load-balancing on by default; unequal-cost load-sharing can be used with the variance command. Max hop count is 100.

EIGRP: Multicasts full routing table only when an adjacency is first formed. Multicasts updates only when there is a change in the network topology, and then only advertises the change.

Multicasts to 224.0.0.10 and allows the use of subnet masks. Uses DUAL routing algorithm. Unequal-cost load-sharing available with the variance command.

By mastering the basics of these protocols, youre laying the foundation for success in the exam room and when working on production networks.

Pay attention to the details and the payoff is “CCNA” and “CCNP” behind your name!

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Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage (www.thebryantadvantage.com), home of FREE CCNA and CCNP tutorials and daily exam questions, as well as The Ultimate CCNA and CCNP Study Packages.

For a FREE copy of his latest e-books, “How To Pass The CCNA” or “How To Pass The CCNP”, and for free daily exam question, visit the website and download your copies!

Nowhere is that more than configuring a trunk between two switches.

You know that IEEE 802.1Q (“dot1q”) and ISL are your two choices of trunking protocols, and you know the main differences between the two. What you might not have known is that theres a third trunking protocol thats running between your Cisco switches, and while its a transparent process to many, you had better know about it for your BCMSN and other CCNP exams!

The Cisco-proprietary Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP) actively attempts to negotiate a trunk link with the remote switch. This sounds great, but there is a cost in overhead – DTP frames are transmitted every 30 seconds. If you decide to configure a port as a non-negotiable trunk port, theres no need for the port to send DTP frames.

DTP can be turned off at the interface level with the switchport nonegotiate command, but as you see below, you cannot turn DTP off until the port is no longer in dynamic desirable trunking mode. (Dynamic desirable is the default mode for most Cisco switch ports.)

SW2(config)#int fast 0/8

SW2(config-if)#switchport nonegotiate
When youre working with Cisco switches in a home lab or rack rental environment, run IOS Help regularly to see what options are available for the commands youre practicing with. Cisco switch ports have quite a few options, and the best way to find them is with one simple symbol – the question mark!

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Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage (www.thebryantadvantage.com), home of FREE CCNA and CCNP tutorials and daily exam questions, as well as The Ultimate CCNA and CCNP Study Packages.

For a FREE copy of his latest e-books, “How To Pass The CCNA” or “How To Pass The CCNP”, and for free daily exam question, visit the website and download your copies!