The World's Greatest Blog

For a change, I’m entirely happy with the top 3 search providers!

They have seemingly banged their heads together and improved the life of a webmaster substantially with their new treatment of sitemaps.

Read all about it here.

That is good news. Essentially, what Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have done is agreed upon a standard way to find sitemaps.xml files from websites, using the robots.txt file, and one line like this:

sitemap: http://www.24hourtrading.co.uk/sitemap.xml

It’s so simple! Why could they not have thought of this before? Perhaps then I would not have spent hours using the Google Sitemaps, Yahoo SiteExplorer and MSN rss submit pages, where I did begin to feel as though I were doing the work of a search spider myself.

This is a far better method, requiring webmasters only to know 2 things:

1. Make a sitemap.xml file which is standards compliant and update it all the time;

2. Put the little link into your robots.txt file.

That’s all you have to do now!

Well done big three, I commend your finally coming together to make our lives easier.