Ah you know it’s going to be a good day when you get to learn something new right off the bat - and this something new is something you had been wishing for from Google ;-)

I do a fair bit of work with bilingual websites; most of these sites offer visitor sitemaps in English and in French - two separate sitemaps.

Typically when I need to make an XML sitemap for Google or Yahoo! I will create an English sitemap and a French sitemap and then merge them together into one single sitemap using Dreamweaver.

I often thought that Google Sitemaps should allow for multiple sitemaps for one website because quite often I would like to review issues by language - broken links, search terms, etc. I may be working on the English while my colleague works on the French.

Answer found :-) Google Sitemap index file provides the opportunity to group multiple sitemaps - very handy given the limitation of 50,000 URLs in a single sitemap! If you anticipate your Sitemap growing beyond 50,000 URLs or 10MB, you should consider creating multiple Sitemap files. If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you can list them in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps.

Would you believe that this information is not new? It was blogged about on Inside Google Sitemaps in 2005!

Some resources for you (while I run off to create multiple sitemaps on my site):

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html#sitemapFileRequirements
• Sitemaps Pal - for Creating Sitemaps

A client recently asked me which would be better on their website: a form all on one page or a multi page form for visitors to complete.

They were asking from an SEO standpoint - and from an SEO perspective it does not really matter since forms are not spiderable to search engines.

From a visitor completion (conversion) standpoint, the question is major…I just didn’t know the answer to the question as it varies by industry and by site. The only proper way to answer this question is with A/B testing.

Google has just released free software to do this called Google Website Optimizer. Like all of Google’s releases, it is only available to certain advertisers who fill out a form and request the software.

From their site:

Use Website Optimizer to test different website content. Graphical reports show which content engages your audience and results in the highest conversions. Run that content to improve your users’ experience and convert visitors to customers. Complete the steps below and sign-up to participate in our beta test. We can only invite a small number of advertisers at this time, but hope to open the tool to all Advertisers over the coming months.

I completed my request to beta test and will announce here if we are accepted ;-)

P.S. I just came across a blog posting by a former SEM student who is offering a Webinar entitled “Increasing Your Landing Page Conversion with Google Website Optimizer”. The Webinar is free (aside from a long distance phone call), is 40 minutes long and takes place November 10. Signup on the ROI Revolution website.

I was reading Open Call for SERPs that Need Explaining at SEOmoz and decided to do a Google search (notice I did not say “I Googled”) for “SEO” to see if I get the same results as Randfish.

I don’t (my #5 result was his #1 result - another reason why you can’t bank on search engine rankings as metric for your website) and my results are ugly!

I have a combination of Sponsored Links (AdWords), subscribed links, perhaps a Google Finance result? and then organic listings.

See the picture for yourself.

After reading a post by Randfish on the SEOmoz Blog about Google showing an icon beside the ads of merchants who offer Google Checkout to their website visitors, I decided to conduct a couple of searches to see if we can see this in Canada.

When Google was beta testing Click to Call and showing a phone beside certain ads, we could not see this when doing a search in Canada.

Apparently we are not seeing the Google Checkout icon either, but in the process of looking for it I discovered that AdWords is showing geographical locations under some ads. The geo-location so far is city or province and is only showing on Canadian ads (I am searching using Google.ca but have not limited my choices to Canada only).

See the screenshot below, for a search on “affordable furniture” without quotes.

Organic Spam is a new term that has been crossing my plate frequently. Think of it as search engine spam, in the organic or non paid portion of the search engine results.

I had recently heard about a company that was able to thousands of domain names into Google within I”ll say a couple of weeks of purchasing the domain names. When I was following the story, that particular company had had their URLs removed.

I don’t know if it is the same company but a search for “recipe zucchini fingers” brought up a couple of sites that were definitely organic spam. The first giveaway was the URL (8359.cooking.wzj–m3z.org, 12121.food.qza–w25.org, 4810.cooking.wzj–m3z.org)…just out of curiousity I clicked on one of the URLs and sure enough, a page of sponsored links.

While it is irritating as a searcher to come across a site like this, crappy web sites have long been part of the mix of sites that come in the top results for any query. As an SEO Consultant, I have mixed thoughts - 1. Such sites do interfere with a clients ability to be well ranked for a particular query. 2. However, such a site is not a competitor as they do not have relevant information on their website - merely links to other sites.

One part of me has to say “good for you” and realize that owners of such sites are likely making a mint from people clicking on the sponsored links - I for one did not pad anybody’s pocketbook today :-)