Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Agree (on sitemaps)

© 2010, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.

All three blog posts hit me at the same time yesterday. One from the Google blog, one from the Yahoo blog, and one from Live Search.

The big three agree that standards are good, and what better item to standardize than sitemaps. Now, I'm not talking about the sitemap you create for your visitors to help them find their way. I'm talking about the XML file you create to help search engines find all your pages.

There is now a standard format for these sitemaps that all of the major search engines prefer. This is from Yahoo:

Together we're announcing www.sitemaps.org, which provides details of the current release of the Sitemaps protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate on this common protocol. By offering an open standard for web sites, webmasters can use a single format to create a catalog of their site URLs and to notify changes to the major search engines.

Sitemaps are especially important if you have a large site, a site with lots of directories / sub-directories, or a combination of the two.

-Brandon