It is very important to use Sitemaps in your WordPress Blog, because they help your blog visitors get directly to the information they need. Sitemaps also help web spiders find your blog’s links easily. The following points discuss some of the reasons for using Sitemaps in your Blog.
Crawl augmentation
Although web spiders are continuously improving, they are far from perfect. Search engines have no problems admitting this. Here is what Google says about crawl aug mentation:
Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It can be especially helpful if your content is not easily discoverable by our crawler (such as pages accessible only through a form). It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual
crawl and discovery processes.
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The wordpress team recently posted a new message on their blog, about the WordPress Twitter account:
“We’re now starting to re-follow real people from the WordPress community. There will be no more auto-follow. If you are a WordPress developer, designer, blogger, fan site, whatever and would like to appear in the @WordPress updates stream, then send an @ reply to us and we can add you to the new list (assuming you’re not hawking diet pills, free iPads or ways to get a million followers). This way, people who are new to WordPress and go to check us out on Twitter will get a sense of the vibrant community that we have. People who send @ messages to us won’t (hopefully) wonder indefinitely why they were ignored, because without all the spam, maybe we can use Twitter as it was intended to be used, as another channel of communication.”
So, take this in mind if you were following WordPress on Twitter.
This weekend, thousands of WordPress users and developers are among the people attending the South by Southwest (also known as SxSW) Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. To celebrate this, we’re throwing a WordPress BBQ tomorrow so that there’s a place for us all to get together.
If you’re a WordPress fan attending SxSW (or you just happen to be in this area), please join us for lunch after 12pm tomorrow, Sunday March 14. We’re getting the BBQ from Rudy’s and the red velvet cake from Central Market. Yum! Come, eat, talk about the cool things you’re doing with WordPress, let us know what we can do better. Lead developers Mark Jaquith and Ryan Boren will be there, core contributors will be there, plugin and theme developers will be there. You should be, too!
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The following graph shows how Twitter has grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets per day. Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By year 2008, that number was 300,000 per day, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day.
Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, Twitter gets 50 million tweets per day (Now I understand why Twitter home page goes unavailable so often lately) We are talking about 600 tweets per second. Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We’ll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.
Hello there, I’m releasing version 1.3.6 of Tandil WordPress Theme today! Facebook Support was added. You can add your facebook url and activate it from the admin panel. It will show along with Twitter and RSS.
Another improvement is the options panel. The URLs were “sanitized” to avoid undesirable characters to display in the output. It may sound too technical, I know. Basically it’s to comply with the latest wordpress version security demands.
As always, you contact me if you need support.
The new Microsoft Bing search engine is the successor to MSN Live Search. The old MSN Live Search failed to gain substantial market traction. Bing is currently struggling to cut into Google’s market share. Moreover, with Microsoft’s 10-year agreement with Yahoo!, Bing will see a boost in its search user base by absorbing Yahoo!’s search traffic.
It may be a long time before the majority of people switch over to Bing. The fact is that for many people, the word Google is currently a synonymous of “search engine”. At the time of this writing, Microsoft is investing a lot of money and time in marketing Bing, spending tens of millions of dollars on Bing campaigns.
Over the next few years, Microsoft will battle it out with Google for the top spot in the search engine market share. Microsoft did this with Netscape in the browser wars back in the mid 90’s, so there is no reason to believe it will not attempt to do the same thing with Google now.
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The new WordPress Foundation site has just been released today. You can check the first post at the new WordPress Foundation site. They received their first donation from WordCamp NYC. The money will be used to help developing WordPress. It will be great to see this site running the 3.0 development version and the nascent theme called 2010.
Matt Mullenweg, the director of the WordPress Foundation, has been directly involved in the creation of a number of WordPress projects that espouse the core philosophy, including: WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, bbPress and BuddyPress. Go check the foundation site out. Enjoy!
Pagination is another known indexing problem that most Blogs, Forums and article sites will face. If you have many articles on your blog ( you should actually have as many articles as you can) and a lot of content, you can face some duplication issues when those articles get indexed.
When you create a new article, each entry will be found in multiple pages, including the home page, the archives, categories, older pages, calendar, etc. All of these pages are potential duplicated content pages. Once the blog entry becomes older, it starts moving down the page stack. Soon, it takes more and more clicks to reach that article, and then at some point it gets excluded from the search engines.
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Hello everyone! I’m releasing a new version of Tandil Theme today. I’ve had some requests from users to add some lines of the articles, to the category and tag pages. So I added the excerpts feature to the category and tags pages. In the last few versions I minified CSS code, which means that the style.css is going to load faster. This traduces in a faster loading theme.
2010 will be a great year for WordPress and it’s extend framework, WordPress Themes and Plugins. The comnunity is going to get better and better. Soon, WordPress will be a “must have” to run any professional and successful site. Not just blogs, but any site, from e-commerce to personal sites. WordPress is the leading Content Management System.
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The recent release of wordpress 2.9 triggered a bug in certain versions of the PHP’s curl extension. With these versions of curl, scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly. To fix this specific bug as well as a handful of other, lesser issues, we are quickly releasing version 2.9.1, the first maintenance release of the 2.9 line.
Help us get 2.9.1 ready to go by testing 2.9.1 Beta 1. The easiest way to test Beta 1 is to install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, elect to get on the point release development track, and then perform an automatic upgrade via the Tools -> Upgrade menu in your dashboard. You can also download the Beta 1 package and install manually. Fourteen tickets have been fixed in 2.9.1 Beta 1. Since the curl problem and a couple of other problems are dependent on specific hosting configurations, any and all testing help is greatly appreciated.
Plugins, Search Engines, Seo, Sitemaps | admin April 5, 2010 | 
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