Microsys Blog

If you have ever wanted an automatic way to create a visual sitemap of your entire website, check out this visual sitemaps guide.

It will show you how use our sitemap generator tool to create visual navigation sitemap for your website. Simply scan you website, pick the sitemap template you want to use and create a crisp and visual sitemap for your website.

If you are not satisfied with the sitemap styles and templates included in the sitemap creator tool, just create your own HTML/CSS sitemap template! You can either modify an existing template or create one from scratch, so it matches your website layout.

Back in 2010 the webmaster and website forum http://webhelpforums.com was launched. In the beginning it functioned as a support forum for our webmaster and SEO tools such as sitemap generator, website analyzer and keyword analyzer, but it quickly grew into a general webmaster forum with a broad range of topics related to running a website including SEO, SMO, PPC and many more acronyms

While the forum moderators are pretty adamant about not accepting spam and link dropping to websites of dubious quality, it continues to be a “do-follow” forum for those people who contribute content and knowledge. If this sounds good to you, check out the webmaster forum. And yes, it is also possible to market website related services in the “buy and sell” section

Just a couple of quick tips for those starting their own forum: Start out with only a few discussion sections until your forum grows. Then slowly increase amount of sections until you cover all the topics you want. You should also take forceful measures against automated spam since it can quickly lower the quality of the forum.

With the continued updates to our sitemap generator program, now is the time to give it a try (the trial is fully functional for 30 days) if you are thinking about creating image sitemaps or video sitemaps for your website.

If you ever encounter any problems, just contact support. We can help you configure your project files (since default settings are not always enough) or issue a program update in a couple of days. Our goal remains that creating complete image sitemaps and video sitemaps of any website should be straightforward

A1 Sitemap Generator Program Version 2.3 Now Released
Create text, HTML, RSS and XML sitemaps (including mobile, image and video Google sitemaps) to help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask to crawl your websites. The A1 Sitemap Generator crawler engine features lots of website crawling and sitemap building needs: Simultaneous connections, crawler filters, robots.txt, noindex, nofollow and canonical tags, meta redirects, custom timeout values, removal of session IDs, multiple crawl start paths, scan websites on localhost (address can be replaced when creating sitemap files), internet and disks, view broken and redirected links (enhanced in version 2.3) and much more

Creating the sitemaps is likewise supported with lots of options and features. Customize HTML sitemaps through templates. Split and compress XML sitemaps. Generate all kinds of XML sitemaps including image, video and mobile sitemaps. FTP upload the sitemaps created and ping search engines when your sitemaps change. And everything including website scan, creating sitemap files, FTP upload, search engine pings etc. can be automated through a command line interface to our sitemap generator program.

Pricing and Availability
A1 Sitemap Generator runs on all Windows platform (from Windows 95 to Windows 7) and costs $59 USD. The A1 Sitemap Generator program trial is fully-functional and allows to create all kinds of sitemaps. Further information on the product, as well as its free evaluation copy, is available from sitemap generator product page. It is possible to buy the sitemap generator program from the Microsys website. The program comes with an installer and uninstaller. The user interface is natively English but has been either partly or fully translated into: Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

About Microsys
Microsys is located in Aarhus, Denmark. The company is proud to be a member of the Association of Software Professionals (www.asp-software.org).For further information, you can read about Microsys.

Just a quick update for those following development of our sitemap generator program.

The new version 2.0.2 contains improved support for video sitemaps and new support for code sitemaps. While support for both sitemap file kinds may still have a few rough edges, you can now create complete video sitemaps and code sitemaps for most websites in a fully automated way

Should you encounter any issue or have feedback, please let us know. We will be ironing out any issues in the next release. We also intend to improve our sitemap generator tutorials section soon including those tutorials covering the more exotic sitemap file kinds

The last few days I have been working on creating a database covering common questions I have received about Google Webmaster Tools, XML Sitemaps, HTML Sitemaps and the A1 Sitemap Generator program itself of course

The FAQ covers almost everything including how to diagnose and solve crawling errors, handle websites on unstable webservers, scan large websites, questions about XML Sitemaps Protocol, weird Google Webmaster Tool issues, how to configure A1 Sitemap Generator etc.

If you have ever had any questions regarding sitemaps, I highly recommend checking our
sitemapper tutorials and the new sitemap questions and answers database

I make and Sell Software for Living.
As a developer and publisher of software, I have for a few years now been using Google Adwords to run campaigns for my software. While the complexity of creating and optimizing successful campaigns with Google Adwords increases the more time you spend with it, I have always had a good amount of trust in Google. However, what I have found has given me a little doubt in my heart.

Low Quality Websites in Search Network
I came by a blog post by Marketing Shift which shows that the Google Search Network encompasses a lot of websites, and not just websites and search engines of high quality. Indeed, looking at the Google Search Partners website, at least I get the impression that websites in the search network are search related. As pointed out in the blog post, the search network also contains websites that have little to do with search, an important distinction when it comes to setting initial bids. However, that is not really what makes my heart jump…

Websites in Search Network Costing you Money
While above is bad enough, it’s the fact that websites such as GameCopyWorld are part of the search network. At least that is my conclusion as I have had an ad show while I had content network disabled. I believe the website is using Google Search Box / Adsense for Search. Yes, I don’t develop games so why do I care? Well, the before-mentioned website may have many buying-willing users which simply are searching for a way to get paid games to work… But I have a strong suspicion that there exist many more websites in the Google search network without any significant amount of users willing to pay for software.

Let me list a few reasons why I think this is bad from an advertiser perspective:

• People on websites that promote and distributes solutions to circumvent copy protection solutions most likely not do not have a high user percentage share that are willing to buy software.
• The search network is enabled as default. If you decide to keep it on, you are forced to bid the same on all search network partner websites as you bid for searches on Google search engine itself.
• You can’t opt out of individual websites in search network. Yes, you can opt out of websites in content network, but not the search network.
• Google does not share a complete list of search partners.

Alternatives to Google Search Network
I personally have disabled advertising on search network. I rather focus my time and money on campaigns where I can control as much as possible. Here are some alternatives that I am currently doing or considering:

• Advertise on Google search engine itself. Easy, transparent, and high quality clicks.
• Advertise on Google Content Network. Using tight adgroups combined with site exclusion and huge number of negative keywords makes this doable.
• Advertise directly on other search networks. Some paid search advertising solutions and networks are MSN Adcenter, Yahoo, Ask, and LookSmart.

I wrote this blog post since I know how hard most shareware, indie game, and software developers have to work. Whether big companies or mom-and-dad software operations, we are all not just competing against each other, but also against a high amount of software piracy and copying. I much rather spend money advertising on websites that are clearly relevant and not associated with something that compromises the success of my own business.

Getting Indexed and Ranked in Search Engines
You know how to optimize pages for search engines and build links to your website. What is next? Well, a question you need to ask yourself is if you are distributing internal link juice properly. Are you sure the internal link structure of your website has an optimal flow of link juice towards your important pages? If so, you stand a better chance of having search engines index and rank them. The process of optimizing this part of your website is by most search engine marketers called PageRank Sculpting.

PageRank Sculpting Explained
The idea behind the name PageRank Sculpting is not hard to understand. PageRank is the name of the algorithm Google uses to calculate importance for pages based on linking across the entire internet. Mind you, PageRank is just one of many algorithms Google uses to actually rank your pages in search engine result pages. The sculpting part comes from the ability to control how link juice flows throughout your own website.

PageRank Sculpting Examples

1. Many blogs are full of links to various social bookmark and community services. I love social websites such as StumpleUpon, del.icio.us and Digg, but there is a downside to them if you are running a blog.

   Say you are writing a blog post that has one or two links to websites you find interesting. You may think you are giving some nice link love to them; however, by far most of it will be eaten by all those social bookmark links many blog posts are filled with.

   I support the idea of linking to other websites, but at least consider nofollow links that are repeated in each and every blog post you make. If you don’t, even the link juice that flows through your internal links may be diminished in value.

2. The other more conventional area of PageRank sculpting is simply to ensure your important pages, e.g. those promoting your products, get more internal link weight than less important pages such as legal and contact.

   Strategies vary, but if you have a vast number of non-important pages, you can nofollow or limit the number of internal links to them.

PageRank Sculpting Tool
This post would not be complete without a pointer to a website analysis tool we offer that can help you experiment with PageRank Sculpting using robots.txt, noindex and nofollow in <meta> tags, and nofollow in <a> link tags.

A1 Website Analyzer can scan your entire website and all links in it. You can also enable/disable various options for finding links (e.g. enable/disable nofollow support).

After website scan has finished you are shown the entire website and with columns of data for each URL. The important columns in the context of PageRank sculpting are:

• Links to external URLs.
• Links to internal URLs.
• Linked by internal URLs.
• Calculated importance score.
• Scaled importance score.

The importance is calculated by weighing the strength of all links and pages within a website. Links gives more juice if they come from an internally highly linked page that contains few other links. The scaled importance score is logarithmic and have range 0..10.

If you want to control link juice flow and sculpt your PageRank, A1 Website Analyzer is the website analysis tool you need

Sometimes I get asked about priority values in XML sitemaps created by A1 Sitemap Generator. You can choose one of the following ways to handle priority values:

• Have XML sitemap priority values calculated based on all internal links within the website. There is a setting to prevent “extreme values” to be used, e.g. 0.0. This is the default configuration.
• Override priority and set same value for all pages, e.g. 0.5.
• Leave out priority values in total. This is probably preferred to using the same value for all pages.

For more information about how priority values are calculated, see our XML sitemaps priority value article.

The new release of our sitemap generator tool has gone through months of development with special focus on increasing website crawler performance. However, that is not all Lots of feedback (thank you) has helped me to improve program user interface, add new options and fix various issues across entire sitemap generator program including in sitemap builder, sitemaps ping etc.