Yahoo Google and MSN Launch Sitemaps.org
Yahoo, Google, and MSN launched the new Sitemaps.org last night, a webmaster protocol that helps introduce a web standard for robot crawler lists: XML Sitemaps.
A great interview by Chris Richardson of Web Pro News with Tim Mayer of Yahoo and Vaness Fox of Google is posted here.
The new XML sitemaps program is a group acceptance of the Sitemaps service first introduced by Google some months back. The three major search engines are unifying to help work webmasters and site owners in locating, crawling, and indexing more urls and more of the web, especially database powered sites that feature query laiden dynamic urls.
Sitemaps.org is designed as an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. The dynamic sitemaps are simply XML files that list URLs of sites along with additional metas and other tags that inform search engine spiders (that are now responsible for the order of links on organic/natural keyword search results pages at Google, Yahoo, MSN, NetScape, AOL, Roadrunner, Comcast, Charter, Ask, virtually worldwide) how often the content(s) of each URL are updated and the priority or importance of each URL.
The major search engines are hopeful that universal xml sitemaps will help their robot crawlers more intelligently crawl websites.
Sitemaps.org includes a protocol page listing the instructions and information for creating an SEO friendly XML sitemap along with an extensive FAQ file with lots of details.
Creating a universal standard for XML sitemaps is a huge step in terms of collaboration between Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
For more information visit: Sitemaps.org
This should help MSNbot and the Yahoo/Inktomi/Archiver work with dynamic sites much more.
This is a great development and should help the search engines work with large, database-driven websites, that feature query-laiden URL structures.
Good to see the engines join forces and set universal standards.
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