Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed.


Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed.

The companies will collaborate on the Sitemaps protocol and publish enhancements on www.sitemaps.org, which provides all of the details about the Sitemaps protocol, according to Google.

This will enable Webmasters to submit their content in a uniform manner. Any webmaster can submit their Sitemap to any search engine which has adopted the protocol.

Sitemaps

“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.” [source]

How Sitemaps Work

“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.” [source]

Narayanan Shivakumar, Distinguished Entrepreneur with Google, said: “Announcing industry supported Sitemaps is an important milestone for all of us because it will help webmasters and search engines get the most relevant information to users faster. Sitemaps address the challenges of a growing and dynamic Web by letting webmasters and search engines talk to each other, enabling a better web crawl and better results,

Our initial efforts have provided webmasters with useful information about their sites, and the information we’ve received in turn has improved the quality of Google’s search”. [source]

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About Google

Google is a provider of innovative search technologies that connect millions of people around the world with information every day.

About Microsoft

Microsoft Network provides software, services and solutions at the global level. MSN attracts more than 465 million unique users worldwide per month. MSN’s localized versions are available globally in 42 markets and 21 languages.

About Yahoo!

Yahoo! provides online products and services essential to consumers’ lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users around the world.

 

 

 

 

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