The three major search engines Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all agreed to standardize on the Google Sitemaps XML protocol, enabling webmasters to submit the content on their sites to one location.

Previously, webmasters would have to triplicate their efforts and submit their sitemaps to each search engine for indexing separately. Now, site directors can create one XML sitemap for a site and submit it to Google Sitemaps, which has been open sourced and freely available since mid 2005. The idea of a sitemap is to optimize a site so that search engines can easily find content when they regularly crawl the net looking for content to index.

Sitemaps are XML files describing the layout of the site with associated metadata. Those files can let web spiders know the last time a page changed and how important a changed page is so that the indexing process is streamlined. With sitemaps, only pages with changes are visited, which saves bandwidth.

In a joint statement, Windows Live Search general manager Ken Moss said,:-

“the quality of your index is predicated by the quality of your sources and 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 more relevant search results so they can find what they�re looking for faster.”

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. Dont know how to make a sitemap Try easy steps to make a sitemap

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.

I had been using sitemap for my blog also and for previous blogs including.I will dedicate one complete post on sitemap covering both programming aspects and detailed analysis on it.you can see an example of my blog’s sitemap here

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About The Author of this article: Ashish is one of the co-author of this blog and writes on various interesting softwares, PC tips and more. You can read more of his articles here.

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