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<img border="0" src="http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/sample_xml.png" title="Sample_xml" alt="Sample_xml" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px; float: right;" />In a moment of rare cooperation, search rivals Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have, gasp, worked together to [improve the sitemaps protocol][1] which now features [auto-discovery][4] via a robots.txt file. In addition to new features, the big three announced that Ask.com and IBM will now also support the protocol.
Back in November we [covered the initial launch of the sitemaps protocol][2], which was originally developed by Google, but was quickly adopted by Yahoo and Microsoft as well.
Sitemaps are a tool for webmaster to control what pages on their site are indexed and how frequently the search engine spiders should update a page index.
Since then the Sitemaps team has [launched a website][3] and today announced the first big step in widespread adoption of the indexing tool: auto discovery.
Previously if you wanted to add your site's sitemaps to search engine indexes you needed to create an account on each of the three search sites and then tell it where to find your sitemap. Not only was the process rather technical the additional complication of creating accounts, many felt sitemaps were more of a pain than they were worth.
But today's announcement means that webmasters can add a sitemap to all four search engines by adding one line of code to a site's robots.txt file. The actual code looks like this:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
A Google Blog post on the subject [notes][1] that "we still think it's useful to submit your Sitemap through Webmaster tools so you can make sure that the Sitemap was processed without any issues."
Many of the search engines also provide some statistical analysis if you create an account which is a bonus for those that want more tools for watching site traffic. But at least now you don't *have* to do that just to create a sitemap.
[1]: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/04/whats-new-with-sitemapsorg.html "What's new with Sitemaps.org?"
[2]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/the_411_on_site.html "The 411 on Sitemaps"
[3]: http://www.sitemaps.org/ "sitemaps.org"
[4]: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000437.html "Webmasters Can Now Auto-Discover With Sitemaps"
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