After spending a finishing off a new site, installing & configuring servers etc, the SEO ‘expert’ comes along with a list of things that need to be done.

Create a robots.txt

Even though it can see everything we create one?

Add ‘ping’ support

This seems useful and is utilised by most wordpress blogs.  The idea is, you add a new article/news post etc and notify a few sources letting them know to crawl for new content.  I can see the benefit of this if you want to see your pages appearing instantly, however…surely the search engine will come to find it on its own. The more you update, the more frequent a crawler visits.

Create a sitemap.xml file

What now?  I’ve known about sitemap files for a while and since the beginning this seems really pointless.

Create a big list of URLs on your website – so google doesn’t have to?  I am aware that sitemap files, apparantly, do not affect a search engines ability to crawl your site…but how long before it does.

According to wikipedia;

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites where:

• some areas of the website are not available through the browsable interface, or
• webmasters use rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines.

If content isn’t browsable on your website, surely you don’t want it publicly visible or indexed anyway…and if you do, why is it not somewhere within your navigation?  If it can’t be found by person browsing your site, google shouldn’t see it either.

Ajax/Flash/Silverlight….these are all easily sorted as well, I personally don’t see what the problem is.

Anyways, that’s my rant over.