November 16, 2006

In order to allow webmasters and site owners to submit their site to Google, Yahoo and MSN at the same time and in one central location, the three rival search engines are adopting Google's Sitemaps protocol.

Tim Mayer, director of product management at Yahoo Search said "now people will be able to go to just one site for alerting the search engines of their Web sites, something they have been asking for some time".

"In the first joint initiative to improve the Web spidering process for the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN today announced the introduction of Sitemaps 0.90, a free and simple way for site owners and business people to notify search engines about their sites and to enable them to be indexed faster, resulting in better representation in the search engines," a joint news release said.

"For Internet users, Sitemaps 0.90 enables higher quality and fresher search results" the release said.

The new initiative was originally the idea of Google and Yahoo. "We thought it would be great for publishers and Webmasters alike to be able to submit their content in one single format for all three search engines," Mayer said.

He added "we are proposing the format together and inviting other search engines to adopt it."

"Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering fresher and more relevant search results so they can find what they're looking for easier," said Ken Moss, general manager of Windows Live Search at Microsoft.

"I am sure this will be the first of many industry initiatives you will see us working and collaborating on" added Moss.

However, webmasters should note that manual Web page submission process supplements the traditional Web crawling and does not automatically guarantee that the pages will be included in any of the search engine's index.

Source: C-Net News