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Thursday, November 16, 2006

Search Engines Team Up for Sitemaps Protocol

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced they’ll support the Sitemaps format (which originated as Google Sitemaps) together. From Sitemaps.org, the new homepage for the initiative:

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.

This is about the second time the big search engines announce a cooperative – the last time being the nofollow initiative. That’s good for webmasters (though many webmasters, like me, may still be too lazy to care about telling Google and others how to best crawl their site).

[Thanks Pokemo!]

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