Google, Yahoo, MSN Agree on SiteMap Autodiscovery

Today’s announcement is no real surprise, after all Google, Yahoo and MSN had already agreed on the sitemap format. However, there were two important announcements regarding SEO.

The first is that the Ask.com search engine is on board the sitemap format, so now the sitemaps you’ve already created for the big 3 will help the indexing of your sites in Ask.com. This was a necessary step for Ask, who hopes to increase its market share in online search.

The second is that the sitemap format has expanded to autodiscovery, meaning that by simply placing the appropriate text in your robots file the search engines will “discover” your sitemap, so there’s no need to actually submit the sitemap.

For more information on sitemaps, visit sitemaps.org, a site put together by the search engines to help educate webmasters on the format.

Vermont SEO

[tags]sitemaps[/tags]