Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft unite behind sitemaps standard

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Posted by robertDouglass on November 16, 2006 at 12:43pm

See here:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Yahoo_and_Microsoft_rally_behind_sitema...

There is now a very compelling reason to polish (and use) the sitemaps module that we had developed in 2005 as a Summer of Code project.

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Sitemaps.org

Posted by robertDouglass on November 16, 2006 at 5:36pm
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http://www.sitemaps.org/

What are Sitemaps?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is 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) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

More on TechCrunch

Posted by robertDouglass on November 16, 2006 at 5:37pm
robertDouglass's picture

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/15/google-yahoo-and-microsoft-agree-to...

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

sitemaps broken

Posted by Anonymous on November 17, 2006 at 2:34pm
Anonymous's picture

I don't know if it's coincidence or not, but on Nov 15th, the gsitemap module broke and it generates an error every time it tries to submit to google (301 error). I think this is because they changed something on their end - because all of or sites broke at the same time.