MSN, Google, Yahoo! unite to Support SiteMaps...
Date Published 15/11/2006 - Click here for more recent news
If you've never heard of SiteMaps before, then this story is unlikely to be a headline attention-grabber for you - but if you take a word to the wise from EASIserv.com, do read on because it's really a most useful bit of web info! Unless you're steeped in web-talk you'll almost certainly not know that it was Google who really ramped-up the value-add this year with their XML SiteMaps (despite the fact that Yahoo! had a non-XML protocol with their Site Explorer on the go back in 2005) as an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their website that are available for crawling.
NB: XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a W3C initiative that allows information and services to be encoded with meaningful structure and semantics that computers and humans can understand. XML is great for information exchange, and can easily be extended to include user-specified and industry-specified tags.
In its simplest form, a SiteMap is an XML file that lists URLs for a website along with additional meta-data 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. 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.
At EASIserv.com, we bought into the Google XML SiteMaps initiative right from the get-go and we certainly found that by using the Google SiteMap protocol - we were building better, more search-friendly websites that evidently satisfied Google's SiteMap validation. We also formed the view over time with XML SiteMaps that Google visited our new-build websites sooner and appeared to index them more fully. So there we had Google doing XML SiteMaps, Yahoo! doing something different for SiteMaps - and MSN not doing anything for SiteMaps. Webmasters particularly were united in asking the 'Big 3' to get together to support a single standard format for SiteMaps submission - and the great news we hear today is that they're actually going to do just that with a joint initiative on SiteMaps 0.90.
By coming-together and agreeing on a universal standard, the 'Big 3' can provide website owners with one simple way to share information with every search engine - which is really great news for webmasters and website owners. In terms of when? The likelihood is that MSN will be the last of the 'Big 3' to implement the necessary changes - they're presently not promising anything by way of delivery on their bit of SiteMaps until 2007 (didn't say which bit of 2007 though).
Update 11/04/07: Brent Hands, Program Manager, Live Search issues what to all intents and purposes is a NON-announcement.... "Today, I'm happy to announce the latest addition to the protocol: Sitemap Autodiscovery. Autodiscovery gives siteowners the ability to easily share their sitemaps with all search engines at once, without the overhead of manually submitting them to each one."
That's great news Brent, but he then went on to say, "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." So there you have it - MSN's big announcement is that they're still not ready for Sitemaps. Aaaarrrgghhh!
If you want to read more about the SiteMaps protocol you can visit the brand new website called http://www.sitemaps.org.
And after you've read the SiteMaps information contained therein and you've maybe got a flickering of interest in the topic - just ponder this:
- is your website making the best use of SiteMaps? This ability to create a detailed roadmap of your website for better crawling and indexing in search engines?
- or maybe you just don't feel confident enough to do it yourself - if you do it yourself?
- or maybe your present web company just hasn't identified the opportunity to you or just doesn't do search engine positioning?
If you would like to learn how EASIserv.com can help you take advantage of these opportunities for better organic / natural search results, please get in touch and we'll see what we can do to help.
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