Major Search Engines Unite to Support a Common Mechanism for Website Submission
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In the first joint and open initiative to improve the Web crawl process for search engines, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced support for Sitemaps 0.90 (www.sitemaps.org), a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their web pages in their web sites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently, resulting in better representation in search indices. For users, Sitemaps enables higher quality, fresher search results. An initiative initially driven by Yahoo! and Google, Sitemaps builds upon the pioneering Sitemaps 0.84, released by Google in June of 2005, which is now being adopted by Yahoo! and Microsoft to offer a single protocol to enhance Web crawling efforts.
The great thing about Sitemaps is that you don’t have to manually submit your web pages, page-by-page. Think of a sitemap as more of a “feed.” You have one file, such as an XML or TXT file, that consists of paths to all of the pages listed on your site that you wish to have indexed by the search engines. Instead of hoping for search engines to find all of the pages of your site - this sitemap makes their job easier and also results, as stated above, in more comprehensive and efficient representation in search indices.
Together, the sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the Sitemaps protocol and publish enhancements on a jointly maintained website www.sitemaps.org, which provides all of the details about the Sitemaps protocol.
