Sitemaps consists of an XML file designed to crawling by allowing webmasters to list all their pages, notify search engines of changes or new pages, and identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling and conserve bandwidth.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced their common support for Sitemaps 0.90 as a universal method for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. This initiative builds upon the Sitemaps 0.84, which was originally developed as a joint venture between Google and Yahoo.

"At industry conferences, webmasters have asked for open standards just like this," said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch. "This is a great development for the whole community and addresses a real need of webmasters in a very convenient fashion. I believe it will lead to greater collaboration in the industry for common standards, including those based around robots.txt, a file that gives Web crawlers direction when they visit a website."

Representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft each weigh in with their take on the announcement.

"Announcing industry supported Sitemaps is an important milestone for all of us because it will help webmasters and search engines get the most relevant information to users faster. Sitemaps address the challenges of a growing and dynamic Web by letting webmasters and search engines talk to each other, enabling a better web crawl and better results," said Narayanan Shivakumar, Distinguished Entrepreneur with Google. "Our initial efforts have provided webmasters with useful information about their sites, and the information we've received in turn has improved the quality of Google's search."

"The launch of Sitemaps is significant because it allows for a single, easy way for websites to provide content and metadata to search engines," said Tim Mayer, senior director of product management, Yahoo Search. "Sitemaps helps webmasters surface content that is typically difficult for crawlers to discover, leading to a more comprehensive search experience for users."

"The quality of your index is predicated by the quality of your sources and Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo! on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering more relevant search results so they can find what they're looking for faster," said Ken Moss, General Manager of Windows Live Search at Microsoft.

The protocol will be available at sitemaps.org, while will be hosted by Yahoo Small Business. Any site owner will be able to create and upload an XML Sitemap and submit the URL of the file to the participating search engines.

Tags: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Sitemaps

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