Yes !! They finally got it !!
In my post of November last year I asked that the search engines “Make it a standard crawl !! Instruct your robots to look for a file called sitemap.xml the way they look for robots.txt.”
Well, now they are going to do it…. in a even better way as well..
You can read about the announcement on The Ask Blog Sitemaps Autodiscovery they will tell you more on the Search Engine Strategies in New York.
It is going to be simple addition to your robots.txt file like:
SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml
You need to put in the full URL, like for this site is is going to be
SITEMAP: http://herbertvandinther.com/sitemap.xml
Put your sitemap.xml link in your Robot.txt file now!
If you have mutliple sitemap.xml files, you have to put the paths into a sitemap index file and point to that file.
If you don’t want to wait on the Autodiscovery, You can still send them:
To Google via the Webmaster Central,
To Yahoo as a feed in their Site Explorer,
To ask via the command:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml
To Live? I guess just via your Robots.txt file…
Update: Read more on Sitemap and URL Submission
Tags
Optimization, SEO, SEO Optimization, Search Engine, Search Engines
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If you have any problems to create XML sitemap files for your sites or to notify search engines about updated sitemaps, try Sitemap Writer Pro. It is a powerfull tool that helps you to create and keep up-to-date sitemaps for your websites.
Sitemap Writer Pro has new tools – FTP manager for uploading sitemaps, search engine notification tool
(now supports Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN.com), site crawler for adding an URLs into the sitemap and Yahoo Index viewer.
@Arthur,
It looks like a fine product to my, but I like the Notification Tool the most :-)
http://www.sitemapwriter.com/notify.php
Of course Joomla has a Fine sitemap.xml generator build into the OpenSEF component and Joomap…
For WordPress we have the Plugin from http://www.arnebrachhold.de/
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