Interesting Google results
About a year ago I started generating XML sitemaps for Skylines Australia. At the same time I started pushing a bunch of other SEO strategies like friendly URL's, metadata and a search engine friendly 'skin' for my site which is a publically available 'text-only' skin. Its also good for PDA's and mobile phone access.
For a long time, my 'Sitelinks' (displayed under search results where my site comes first) have been made up of members' profiles. This irritates me a lot and I have blocked the links through the Google Webmaster Tools every time I notice them. These are not the pages I want emphasized. So, I added a nofollow to all the links to members' pages that I could find but Google persistently added the members' pages as my Sitelinks. It was becoming desperate. I even asked my friends at SEOmoz (Where I am a pro member). They suggested sculpting my links to move the search engines towards my busier sections.
Anyway, last week there was a breakthrough. I upgraded the SEO software for SAU and decided to rebuild all my sitemaps as I know that Google was finding a lot of errors in the existing ones. I realised that my members' pages were being added to the sitemaps! And, likely, above the other (more important) pages! So, I turned off the adding of members' pages into my sitemaps and already I can see that Google have added my more important pages as Sitelinks (not live yet, but I can see them in the Webmaster Tools). Precisely what I wanted and I can't believe the solution was so easily missed by myself.
Another case of bad sitemaps. Lots of SEO'ers are against their use entirely.