stinkfoot - 9:50 am on Aug 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

The sitemaps form is fine as a tool to those who have it available. To those who dont what are they supposed to do.

If having a sitemap is now an imperative there are going to be a a lot of unhappy people who are screwed because they dont have technical staff to set up the sitemap software.

This is not communication ... this is a bit Microsoft really. Forcing people to use a tool because you have the power to do so is not good form. It leaves many people in limbo that have good quality information yet no way to talk to you .

Furthermore ... I have a network of 14 or so travel based site all of which are under sever penalties and have been for some 1.5 years. I have used these sitemap tools and go sweet fanny adams in the way of replies.

My staff that produce good quality well research articles on a daily basis are starting to turn away because there doesnt seem to be any point in producing it. Now if you guys were to talk to us, not send auto response cryptic rubbish, it would make a difference to you and to the web scene in general.

The reason I say this is IF you actually told us WHY things were going wrong on our site that only you have the full details of. Then those things that webmasters are doing wrong would change. There is no doubt in my mind that a policy of truly helpful advice to webmasters who do produce good unique information that is of interest to the public would help

1) Google (get rid of spam, black hat SEO and keep it that way)
2) Webmasters (realise what is required to get more than 5 hits a day off of 14 sites with 20000 pages of unique information)
3) THE PUBLIC be able to find good quality information without having to search through 10 pages of bad quality stuff

What is the problem with talking to those people who used to use you when you were small and still would like to use you now if only you didn't sensor good quality info.

Hey know what? I have had an idea.

How about .. you tell us on your sitemap what penalties we are under and what we should do to fix them in a general sence. That wouldn't take up much in the way of your resources and make us feel like we were getting a reasonable amount of feedback.

Just an Idea