Sitemap.xml and autodiscovery by Google, Ask, Yahoo and Live via Robots.txt

by Herbert-Jan van Dinther on Thursday 12 April 2007

in Optimization,SEO,SEO Optimization,Search Engine,Search Engines

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

, , , ,

Intresting Article? Inform Others, You know how...:
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Technorati
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Digg
  • BlinkList
  • Netvibes

Related Articles

  • Sitemap.xml standard like Robots.txt for Google, Live and Yahoo and Others
  • Sitemap.xml for Yahoo, Google and Live
  • Google, Yahoo or Microsofts IE7
  • How Search Engines Help finding Keywords
  • Is Ask is going for Web 2.0 Search and Getification
  • The Big Four Search engine features compared
  • Lost and Regained Traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN the Easy Way

  • { 2 comments… read them below or add one }

    Arthur April 20, 2007 at 1:25 pm

    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.

    Hummerbie April 24, 2007 at 11:22 am

    @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/

    Leave a Comment

    { 2 trackbacks }

    Previous post:

    Next post: