Google's Sitemaps Team Interviewed

Recently I had the great opportunity to interview the Google Sitemaps Team: Shiva Shivakumar who started the program in June 2006; Vanessa Fox, the extremely helpful spokeswoman who blogs for the Sitemaps team and assists Webmasters in the newsgroup; her coworkers Michael and Andrey from Google's Kirkland office, Grace and Patrik from the branch in Zurich, and Shal from the Googleplex in Mountain View. Matt Cutts chimed in with some good advice too.

I want to thank those friendly Googlers for taking the time to contribute loads of great technical advice and extremely valuable information to the Google Sitemaps Knowledge Base.

Besides Sitemaps related information, the interview provides the ultimate answer to the endless "404 vs. 410" debate, explains the URL removal tool Matt Cutts was talking about yesterday at Webmasterradio, provides hints to optimize dynamic Web sites ... hey, just read it to find all the gems:

Google Sitemaps Team Interview

Consider bookmarking the Google Sitemaps Info Page and subscribing to the Sitemaps Feed to get alerted on future stuff like that.


Tags: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Google Sitemaps