12 April 2007

World's leading search engines announce Sitemaps Autodiscovery

The world's search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search and Ask, have announced they will be supporting 'autodiscovery' of sitemaps. This means that webmasters will be able to specify the location of their sitemaps in the robots.txt file.

Thus with the new format, sites will no longer have to submit their sitemap to search engines separately. The following line should be added to the robots.txt file: Sitemap: http://www.example.com / sitemap.xml

This new autodiscovery format will benefit both webmasters and search engines. They'll save time for webmasters, as they will no longer have to submit their content to search engines.

Search engines will automatically acquire information on pages to index, content and meta data, updated pages and the most important pages, all from the robots.txt file. The sitemap protocol at sitemap.org is now available in 18 different languages so that sites globally will know about the new sitemap format.

Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! are all supporting the new autodiscovery sitemaps format. Ask.com is also now supporting submission of sitemaps through http://submissions.ask.com / ping?sitemap=SitemapUrl.

Like manual sitemap submission, autodiscovery will not necessarily index all site pages. The pages are still required to meet search engine criteria in order to be indexed. In the early stages, it may be worthwhile to manually submit sitemaps to ensure they will be processed. This will enable webmasters to have access to specialized monitoring and reporting tools, or information on how they crawl your site.

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