14 DAY TRIAL // Even though the three major players on the search engine market are stuck in an endless three-horse race for audience, market share and the biggest slice of the online advertising industry, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have no problems joining hands from time to time. Especially if collaborating will benefit all search engine developers equally. It is the case of support for cross-domain sitemaps. One thing that Microsoft needs to do with Live Search is to get on par with Google and Yahoo. Despite advancements delivered by Windows Live Wave 2 at the end of 2007, Live Search is still lagging in terms of features, capabilities, functionality and ultimately technology behind both Yahoo and Google. But at the same time, there are small steps forward and support for cross-domain sitemaps is just another illustrative example in this regard.
"We're pleased to announce an update to the Sitemaps Protocol, in collaboration with Ask, Google, and Yahoo! This update should help many new sites adopt the protocol by increasing our flexibility on where sitemaps are hosted. Essentially, the change allows a webmaster to store their sitemap files just about anywhere, using a reference in the Robots.txt file to establish a trusted relationship between the sitemap file and the domain or folder," explained, Fabrice Canel, Program Manager, Live Search Crawler.
Microsoft explained that the added support for cross-domain sitemaps came as a natural consequence of the feedback delivered by webmasters. The move is designed to help webmasters that want to host sitemaps for various domains and sub-domains in a single location. With the new Sitemaps Protocol, moving of sitemaps away from the domain they are associated with, is now a supported scenario.
"Here are a few other useful notes about our implementation: we support multiple 'Sitemap:' references in your robots.txt files. We recommend you limit the size of your robots.txt file to less than 1 MB, if multiple sitemaps for a domain include the same URL with conflicting metadata (i.e. priority, change frequency, etc), we will disregard the metadata and just look at the URL. Individual sitemap files should never be larger than 10 MB when uncompressed. This includes all sitemap file formats: XML, RSS and Text. You can upload your sitemap in our Webmaster Tools. You can ping us with updates to your sitemap using our Ping URL: http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=[Your sitemap web address:" - Canel added.