WebProNews is shooting video all week at SES Chicago and they have recently posted an excellent one named SES: Google’s Fox Clarifies Sitemaps, PageRank. Here are my notes, the video is about 18 minutes.
Rand asks is the duplicate content filter = duplicate content penalty? "There is no penalty" but there is some type of "filtering" going on, Google picks the best page (at least they hope so).
Does Google care about the code to text ratio? Google doesn't care that much about this.
Which sitemaps file format should you use? It depends on how easy it is for you to make these files, totally depending on your coding level. The XML file might be best, because you have optional data that you can string along. More tidbits in there, also covered in sessions this week. She said sitemaps are more about crawling than rankings.
Is the PageRank in Sitemaps tools more updated than the toolbar? She said the data in sitemaps is more accurate and more up-to-date than the toolbar.
Will we see inlink data in Sitemaps? Vanessa said, she thinks it would be awesome.
David Naylor said Sitemaps is a poor choice for good SEOs, SEOs should be more than capable to get your site indexed. Your thoughts Vanessa? She said, why do you have to choose, everything is important.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.