Yahoo and MSN join Google in supporting the sitemap protocol

[mandy]

Yahoo, Google and Microsoft join forces (really !!) behind Sitemaps

The best part about to-do lists is when you get to cross something off, and today we can cross one more from the list of feedback we have collected from webmasters. You have asked us to support a single format for submission and today we want to talk about how we are teaming up with Google and Microsoft to support Sitemaps 0.90.

Together we're announcing www.sitemaps.org, which provides details of the current release of the Sitemaps protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate on this common protocol. By offering an open standard for web sites, webmasters can use a single format to create a catalog of their site URLs and to notify changes to the major search engines. This should make is easier for web sites to provide search engines with content and metadata. And in turn, search engines can spend less time crawling unchanged pages and can update indexes faster as new content is discovered. This will help us reflect the changes more quickly, and improve our ability to provide more timely and relevant search results for users. Sitemaps is available to any site owner who wishes to communicate more easily with participating search engines. Simply create and upload an XML Sitemap and submit the URL of the file to search engines.

You can submit Sitemaps to Yahoo! Search through Site Explorer, just like you could add RSS feeds up to now. Just add the site to which the feed belongs, to your list of sites, and then add the feed for that site. We will retrieve the sitemap and use the data you provide us.

announcement: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000380.html
the new Sitemaps site: http://www.sitemaps.org/
submit sitemaps to Yahoo here: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

[FiberGuy]

'Bout time!

[bargainbloodhound]

Nice, but what I'd really like to see is an increase in the 50,000 URL limit for sitemap files.

[FiberGuy]

[quote author=bargainbloodhound link=topic=6142.msg34237#msg34237 date=1164829265]
Nice, but what I'd really like to see is an increase in the 50,000 URL limit for sitemap files.
[/quote]

BBH - you probably already know this but just in case:  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters...swer=34658&topic=8514

A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.

...and to elaborate:  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ses-nyc-2006-day-1/feed/

A Sitemap can list up to 50,000 URLs and be up to 10MB.
http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/do...quirements

If you have more URLs than that, you can break them into multiple Sitemap files and then list those in a Sitemap index file (which can list up to 1,000 Sitemaps).

If you have old pages that you don’t include in your Sitemap, Googlebot will likely still visit them by following links.

It may be more of a pain for what it's worth, depending on how many individual sitemaps you need to generate.  The details of the "sitemap index" file are unknown to me... I'd have to look deeper into the guidelines.

Cheers

[bargainbloodhound]

The details of the "sitemap index" file are unknown to me

They're unknown to me too. One of these days I'll get around to making sitemap indexes.

Our sites without sitemaps tend to be indexed very quickly anyways...maybe because they're older domains.