One Sitemap Protocol to Bind Them All

(Via Techrcunch)

Google, MSN Microsoft Live Search, and Yahoo have all agreed to use the same sitemap protocol:

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

You can read the announcement from Yahoo! for info on how to submit your sitemap to them (basically you add it as a feed in site explorer).

The announcement from Microsoft’s Live Search blog has no word on how to submit yet: “we are working hard to release full support in 2007.”

If you use WordPress, there’s a great plugin to generate sitemaps whenever you write new posts or edit old ones. I just installed it and you can read the sitemap here if you enjoy reading xml.

The Sitemaps protocol itself is being released under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons license - which should encourage others (CMS software projects, blog platforms, etc. as well as other aggregation/search sites) to leverage it as well.