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November 16, 2006

Search Engines Bring United Front to Sitemaps

Posted by Lisa Barone

The big news item of the day is that Yahoo! and Microsoft have joined together in support of Google’s Sitemaps XML protocol, an open-source tool that allows site owners to submit their content via crawler feeds in order to ensure proper spidering. This means site owners will now be able to go to one place to manually submit their site and alert GYM to any site changes.

This is pretty cool, and something most savvy search folk have been after for a long time.

Yahoo Search Product Manager Priyank Garg does a good job of explaining the benefits for both the engines and webmasters:

“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.”

If you’re already using Google Sitemaps, you don’t have to do anything to reap the benefits. Just be aware the change has taken place and you can now reach Yahoo! and Microsoft using the same protocol.

If you haven’t been using Google Sitemaps, you can head over to the newly debuted Sitemaps.org site and learn how to install the XML file that will allow GYM to track site updates.

Again, this is very cool.

According to CNET, the idea for the standard protocol was initiated by Google and Yahoo!. The tool has been given Creative Commons license so that other engines can get on board as well, though who knows how much participation they’ll be allowed. There’s no mention of Ask.com’s lack of involvement, but that may be because they don’t accept manual submissions. Or maybe they just weren’t cool enough to be invited to the party. (I feel your pain, Ask.)

Even if Ask never gets on board, this is a great step for the engines to have made. Getting competitors to agree on common standards will enable site owners to spend less time worrying about submitting sites and more time on making those sites as strong and relevant as possible. It’s also good to see GYM united for good every once and awhile. We saw it when they united on the nofollow attribute for links, and now we’re seeing it again here,

And who knows, now that we’ve seen unification on this, maybe we’ll see other big search issues get a common solution down the road. It’d be nice to see the engines support universal advanced search commands or create a better system for detecting click fraud or work together to fight spam and great more relevant engines. But we’ll try not to get ahead of ourselves.

If you want to read more from straight from the engines themselves, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all blogged about it. And of course, it’s getting just a touch of coverage at Techmeme.

Posted at November 16, 2006 11:18 AM
View related entries in: Google, MSN Search, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Yahoo