Major Search Engines Combine Forces to Support Common Sitemap

Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have pooled their resources to provide webmasters a free way to notify the search engines about their web pages. The goal is to help the search engines to index sites more comprehensively and efficiently. By providing a new sitemaps protocol for all three major search engines, webmasters can maintain just one sitemap of their web pages.

The sitemaps.org domain name was first registered by Google on August 12, 2001 and is owned by Google. However, the sponsoring companies (Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft) will continue to collaborate on the Sitemaps protocol and publish enhancements on this website that is jointly owned by all three search engines.

According to a press release about Sitemaps.org, “A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

Sitemaps enhance the current model of Web crawling by allowing webmasters to list all their Web pages to improve comprehensiveness, notify search engines of changes or new pages to help freshness, and identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling and save bandwidth. Webmasters can now universally submit their content in a uniform manner. Any webmaster can submit their Sitemap to any search engine which has adopted the protocol.”

Any website owner can create and upload an XML Sitemap file and submit the URL of the file to participating search engines. Google Sitemaps has been available for quite some time now, and webmasters have been giving it mixed reviews. Some have reported that when they started using Google Sitemaps their search engine rankings went down, but others have reported generally good results. Overall, the consensus has been that when you submit your sitemap to Google, the search engine does a much more thorough job of looking at the website.

The new Sitemaps.org website protocol, called Sitemap 0.90, is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft. Sitemaps.org has a full comprehensive “frequently asked questions” section.