This weekend I was doing a little housekeeping on some of my domains and hosting accounts and decided to test and see if it was possible to get a website indexed using XML Sitemaps and no external links.

(more…)

I got an update on Vitria for the first time in a few years a little while back. Vitria started back in 1994 with Enterprise Application Integration capabilities and has added Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring and ultimately Business Event Management/Complex Event Processing functionality over the last few years. They are using “Operational Intelligence” as a label for this collection of functionality and their product is M3O, a strong integration-centric Business Process Management Suite with a broad customer base, multiple awards etc

(more…)

I’m a big fan of the Google Webmaster Central Program and using sitemaps. I agree that you should build your website so that it is crawlable and not rely on sitemaps to compensate for poor site architecture, but hands down there is no better tool when you are migrating or cleaning up after a site migration than webmaster central. However there’s a dark side to webmaster central that I haven’t seen anyone else bring up.

First we need to dive a little deeper into webmaster central and sitemaps. One of the subtle features of webmaster central is the priority tag in the XML file.

You are allowed to specify a value from 0.1 (lowest) to 1.0 (highest) for your pages. Now some people try to “trick” the search engines giving all of their pages a 1.0 thinking this will result in a SEO benefit.

(more…)