ROR files

[David Tayler]

I read somewhere that ROR files (ror.xml) were the next big thing for SEO. Can anyone tell me, what they are, what they do, whether they are as important for SEO as people make out, and how you use them.

Cheerz!

Dave

[WebEdit]

These kinds of files are like a road map to your website for a search engine spider. You can tell the search engine how often your pages are updated and which ones are the really important ones.

It's like Google Sitemap except it's for all search engines.

You can get a free ror file generated here: http://www.rorweb.com/

[NS-Icon]

Sounds interesting, ill take a look at that myself, didn’t know much about these either, heard about them a while ago but then lost track and forgot

I wonder if this is what the big-boy hosts use to increase their search engine positions I am sure these alone wont make all the difference, but used with other techniques could provide a good boost.

[ElCaballo]

I looked around on the web a bit and I'm having a hard time finding out about ror in realtion to whether Yahoo and MSN actually use them. I think Google stole the idea and turned it into Google sitemap. I don't know if this new description tech will take off or if the biggies will all just make their own versions. It would be nice if they could all just agree on one standard to use so we don't have to have 10 different xml files that all say the same thing sitting on our sites.

This all comes from the idea of the semantic web from what I gather.

Check out this quote from w3.org:
The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming.

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001

BTW, I found an absolutely awesome sitemap generator here: http://johannesmueller.com/gs/

It will crawl your site and make a sitemap for you. It will also tell you about all your broken links, how fast your pages load, their sizes and all kinds of sort of interesting and sort of useless statistics. I thought it was very cool, especially since it's free.