In four separate announcements today from Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo have announced a new robots.txt protocol for a sitemap autodiscovery on Sitemaps.org.
Ask.com – The first bit of news is that Ask.com has joined their counterparts in the development of Sitemaps.org.
Ask.com is now supporting submission of Sitemaps via http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=SitemapUrl.
We are excited about our participation with the Sitemaps via robots.txt protocol and look forward to our collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others in furthering important initiatives that make search easier for webmasters and more powerful for users.
Google – Google explained further with the actual context of the new protocol:
We wondered if we could make it so easy that you wouldn’t even have to tell us and every other search engine that supports Sitemaps. But how? Well, every website can have a robots.txt file in a standard location, so we decided to let you tell us about your Sitemap in the robots.txt file. All you have to do is add a line like
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
to your robots.txt file. Just make sure you include the full URL, including the http://. That’s it. Of course, we still think it’s useful to submit your Sitemap through Webmaster tools so you can make sure that the Sitemap was processed without any issues and you can get additional statistics about your site.
MSN Live Search – they stated that the new protocol is not available yet!
Although we aren’t ready to start consuming sitemaps quite yet, I encourage you to build a sitemap and add the “sitemap” directive to your robots.txt. As soon as we roll out support (before the end of the year), we will be able to start crawling your sitemap files immediately. If you want more detail on the sitemaps protocol, including autodiscovery, check out www.sitemaps.org.
Yahoo – they are still pushing their SiteExplorer and that IBM also intends on supporting the new protocol.
If you prefer, you can continue to issue Sitemaps to Yahoo! Search by simply inputting the URL for your Sitemap and submitting. Or add feeds to a site you are already managing under ‘My Sites’ in Site Explorer. This also allows us to provide more feedback to you about what we are doing with the sitemap.
We’re also happy to have some east coasters, Ask and IBM, announce their support for Sitemaps. The more the merrier!
It is great to see that the search engines are collaborating on something more important than “no follow” attributes.
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