[Code Monkey]

It looks like our jobs as webmasters is going to get a little bit easier as the big three have come together in agreement on a standard. I think that is great news and hope this takes effect as soon as possible.

Google: Official Google Blog: Search engines united

Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so that search engines can more effectively crawl them. We released it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license in the hopes that other search engines would adopt the protocol too. And today, we're excited to announce that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in officially supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As the web becomes more dynamic, Sitemaps will enable better and fresher search results for everyone who uses the web. For site owners, Sitemaps will help improve website visibility in search results. You can read more about this on our Webmaster Central blog.

Yahoo: Yahoo! Search blog: Yahoo, Google and Microsoft join forces (really !!) behind Sitemaps

The best part about to-do lists is when you get to cross something off, and today we can cross one more from the list of feedback we have collected from webmasters. You have asked us to support a single format for submission and today we want to talk about how we are teaming up with Google and Microsoft to support Sitemaps 0.90.


Together we're announcing sitemaps.org - Home, which provides details of the current release of the Sitemaps protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate on this common protocol. By offering an open standard for web sites, webmasters can use a single format to create a catalog of their site URLs and to notify changes to the major search engines. This should make is easier for web sites to provide search engines with content and metadata. And in turn, search engines can spend less time crawling unchanged pages and can update indexes faster as new content is discovered. This will help us reflect the changes more quickly, and improve our ability to provide more timely and relevant search results for users. Sitemaps is available to any site owner who wishes to communicate more easily with participating search engines. Simply create and upload an XML Sitemap and submit the URL of the file to search engines.


You can submit Sitemaps to Yahoo! Search through Site Explorer, just like you could add RSS feeds up to now. Just add the site to which the feed belongs, to your list of sites, and then add the feed for that site. We will retrieve the sitemap and use the data you provide us.


We are open to feedback and ideas on what more we can do with Site Explorer and Sitemaps. Share your thoughts in our forum, we’d love to hear from you.

MSN Live Search: Live Search's WebLog : Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! Unite to Support Sitemaps

Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol. The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world. This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it.

So, why are we excited to work on this? Because by agreeing on a standard, we can provide site owners with one simple way to share information with every search engine. You just publish a sitemap, and every engine is instantly able to read and use the data to more effectively index your site. Since this is a free, widely supported protocol, our hope is that this will foster an even broader community of developers building support for it.



We are 100% behind this protocol - this kind of collaboration will help improve the search experience for all of our customers, and we are working hard to release full support in 2007. We are starting to alpha test with internal partners such as MSDN and Microsoft Support now. Like all teams at Microsoft, we like to dogfood our work internally to ensure that it is working properly before it is publicly released. Watch this space for an update as soon as we’re done.

sitemaps.org - Home