Yahoo! and Microsoft Join Google

Grace Kwak, Product Manager at Google, was pleased to announce that Yahoo! and Microsoft joined Google in supporting the Sitemap protocol, an element that will allow search engines to crawl URLs more effectively. "Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so that search engines can more effectively crawl them. We released it under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license in the hopes that other search engines would adopt the protocol too. And today, we're excited to announce that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in officially supporting the Sitemap protocol," he said.

"As the web becomes more dynamic, Sitemaps will enable better and fresher search results for everyone who uses the web. For site owners, Sitemaps will help improve website visibility in search results," he added.

But what is actually Sitemaps? It represents a new technology that enables web developers to inform search engines about the URLs on their site, before it will be crawled. But the best definition is offered by the official site of 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."