Sitemaps Protocol Finally Agreed Upon
Posted December 7th, 2006 by JohnWhat do you get after you lock Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Terry Semel in closed quarters??
Google, Yahoo, and MSN have all agreed upon a standard protocol for sitemaps. For those of you who do not know, sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. This way all the pages you would like indexed, can be easily found and possibly indexed by these major search engines.
For this protocol, the Sitemap is to be an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site). This information will enable search engines to more intelligent when crawling websites. This may sound familiar to most of you, since Google is already using this type of technique for Google Sitemaps. So then, why would MSN and Yahoo agree to a standard invented by Google?
Well, if we stop and think about this it’s easy to see how they would be at a competitive disadvantage if they did not join big G. Google is Number 1 in search. Webmasters want Google traffic, hence are already using Google Sitemaps. By making the webmasters recreate their sitemaps specifically for your search crawler (in the chance that they decide your engine will drive enough traffic to make it worthwhile), resentment may form! Webmasters are busy people who do not want to work on the same thing over and over for different search engines. Therefore, I applaud both Yahoo and MSN for finally biting the bullet, acknowledging that Google’s sitemap protocol is the best thing since sliced bread, and agree to implement it on your own index to the applause of millions of webmasters!
Yahoo has already been integrating this sitemap protocol into their Site Explorer, and MSN is claiming full compliance by 2007. Now that Yahoo, MSN and Google feel like one big happy family I wonder what they will decide to do next….a universal crawler: The Slivebot!!
Tags: sitemaps
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