Yahoo and Microsoft join Google supporting web indexing standard

Industry standard helps developers

16 November 2006 15:25 GMT / By Amber Maitland

Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google are all supporting the same technology for webmasters to use in order to notify search engine crawlers about their sites.

Sitemaps 0.9, which is a Google technology, is now supported by Google’s chief search rivals in order to make life easier for webmasters.

Developers have long sought a tool that allows them to send information to web crawlers by various search engines without having to code differently for each.

A Sitemap is an XML file that flags up a site for search engines to look at. The file contains a list of all URLs as well as data on when the page was edited, so that crawlers can obtain more accurate information when indexing sites.

An entrepreneur with Google, Narayanan Shivakumar told Reuters, “Sitemaps address the challenges of a growing and dynamic web by letting webmasters and search engines talk to each other, enabling a better web crawl and better results”.