Google, Yahoo and MSN Agree on a Common Sitemap

Google’s sitemap submission service has been benefiting webmasters and search engine marketers for a while now. These XML files help inform the search engine what pages on your website are available for crawling. Seems Yahoo and MSN would like to follow suite and to collaborate on a common protocol. Sitemaps.org (a domain registered by Google) is available to people who would like more information about creating and submitting valid sitemaps.

It is nice to see the major search engines agreeing on a common protocol. Just as the W3C has helped web developers with browser uniformity, this is sure to help, and save time, for the thousands of SEM’s our there.

Yahoo previously had a pseudo-submission tactic of creating a text file that included a list of your web site’s URLs. MSN had yet to release any sort of service.