Google's Lady Clarifies Sitemaps and PageRank

Sitemaps.org was born from a historic collaboration between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, and intends to simplify the tedious endeavor of directing search engines to your site's relevant content.

Thus, sitemaps are garnering renewed focus and while the forge is still hot, Vanessa Fox -- Project Manager at Google Webmaster Center -- helps clear the smoke.

And who better to press a key member of Google Sitemaps for answers than Rand Fishkin, SEO expert from SEOmoz.org.

Soo... does a duplicate content filter induce duplicatecontent penalties? What about format preference? Is XML kingor can a simple text file suffice? What the hell is OAI-PMH? Given some recent dialog on sitemaps versus other SEO methods, Vanessa reiterates the intent of a sitemap: it should be merely one part of the strategy.

"[Google] Sitemaps doesn't impact your ranking at all -- it helps with the very first obstacle of learning about all of your pages. It's about crawling, thus it doesn't preclude code optimization, site organization or other sensible methods in SEO. It may indirectly allow for better ranking but won't provide it." said Vanessa.

Fox also addresses common concerns such as code to text ratio, priority settings and Google Toolbar's PageRank reports versus Google Webmaster Tool's.

Here's below the full video interview!

Tags: Google PageRank, Google Webmaster, Google Sitemaps, business, money, profits, internet, blog, success, marketing