Google,MSN and Yahoo to Support Unified Sitemap
With the agreement of the major search engines namely Google, Yahoo and MSN upon a unified system for the submission of web pages to crawlers, the entire SEO world is once again in buzz.
While Google launched their sitemaps plan on the 2nd of June, 2005, the other players followed the same path quite later. Now, both Yahoo and MSN have given a green signal to the Google Sitemap 0.84 Xml protocol that was primarily released as a beta program by Google Labs, under the Attribution/ Share Alike Creative Commons License.
For the uninitiated, this Sitemap is an XML file that is used to list URLs for a website along with extra metadata about each URL including when it was updated last, time it usually takes to change, its relevance for other URLs in the site etc. all this information allows a search engine to crawl a site more efficiently.
Usually web pages are crawled by a search engine through links provided within a site or through other sites. Though sitemap protocol does not assure that crawled web pages will be incorporated in search engines, but does it offer better links to search engines for executing a better crawling task.
The main objective of this protocol is to assist web masters in making the various search engines aware about URLS on their websites so that they can crawl them more competently. It was also hoped that other search engines would also accompanied them in this protocol and this has finally come about
This news is a boon for those webmasters who do submissions to these search engines on a regular basis and have to indulge in different set of standards for each of them
Source: http://www.bessnet.com
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