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>> CUTTS: Lots of questions from the UK. Lee Willis from Cumbria, UK asks, "Why does Google
crawl/index blogs, specifically, sites notified by 'WordPress XMLRPC pings,' so much faster
than a "normal" site submitting a revised Sitemap. What is the impact of that on the
overall 'quality' of the index?" Well, we always try to maximize the quality, the relevance,
the accuracy of our index. And you'd want to make a distinction between crawling and
indexing because Sitemap submission does not guarantee that we will crawl the URLs on that
list. It is very helpful to help us discover new URLs or to make canonicalization decisions,
but we don't guarantee you that if you submit a Sitemap we'll go and crawl it. There have
been some people who did some experiments where they saw that happened, but I'm not
going to, you know, confirmed or deny that, and policy can always change on exactly how
we do use Sitemaps submissions. But crawling and indexing is different, so if you do a
ping a lot the time Google will come and crawl you but often it's Google blog search because
if you're doing those WordPress or web logs or feed burner pings, those pings are often,
you know, the sort of things that are blogs, and, so, a blog search might come and crawl
you five minutes later. But then, if you show up, you might show up in the blog search core
post, not in our main web index core post. So just because you get crawled, it doesn't
mean that you're getting some sort of index boost or anything like that. We do sort of
try to rationally decide what's the best quality of data, how do we get that, sometimes it's
crawling stuff immediately. Like, with blog search, you have a very fast, very real time
sort of results. And sometimes it's, you know, taking Sitemaps and then that might result
in crawling at a different pace or you might not give any boost at all. But we do use that
information in lots of ways to try to help us improve canonicalization and help us try
to improve the quality of our index. So, you know, I wouldn't say, "Oh, ping, that's the
way it automatically gets crawled," or anything like that. If you make great content, you
get to be well-known, we will probably crawl you relatively frequently and see updated
content anytime you make a good change.