November 16, 2006 Yahoo! Google, and MSN will agree on the Sitemap protocol previously supported by Google alone. We all know what a sitemap is, and how it helps your site getting indexed. If not read here. The protocol is basically an XML file uploaded to your root directory, mapping your site and giving a little information on how often it changes, when it was last updated, etc. Though it will not improve rankings in a search engines, it will help with the search engine’s attempt at crawling your site, thus increasing it’s index potential.

From sitemaps.org, the site released by all of the search engines:

«Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.»

This marks the second time that the three big guys teamed up for a common, and greater benefit to the online community. The first was with the recognizing of the ‘nofollow’ tag.

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