| There is some great news in the SEO world that will | | | | robots.txt file.” Yahoo states, “Please |
| change the way webmaster process and submit | | | | provide the complete URL for your Sitemap on this |
| Sitemaps to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and the newest | | | | line. We will pick it up wherever you put it in your |
| member Ask. The four search players announced on | | | | robots.txt file. This directive is not specific to |
| April 11, 2007, that there is a new way to let the search | | | | user-agent. If you have multiple Sitemaps, you can |
| engines know about your Sitemap file. The new | | | | point to your Sitemap index file on this line. Details |
| process is being referred to as the | | | | about the Sitemaps protocol including this addition are |
| “Auto-Discovery” of Sitemaps. | | | | available on the protocol website -- |
| How to specify the Sitemap location in your robots.txt | | | | MSN states, “Although we aren't ready to start |
| file | | | | consuming sitemaps quite yet, I encourage you to build |
| You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a | | | | a sitemap and add the "sitemap" directive to your |
| robots.txt file. To do this, simply add the following line: | | | | robots.txt. As soon as we roll out support (before the |
| Sitemap: | | | | end of the year), we will be able to start crawling your |
| The should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such | | | | sitemap files immediately. If you want more detail on |
| as: [ | | | | the sitemaps protocol, including auto-discovery, check |
| The following is a short snippet from each of their | | | | out |
| statements: | | | | states, “In addition, is now supporting submission |
| Google states, “Second, it's now easier for you | | | | of Sitemaps via |
| to tell us where your Sitemaps live. We wondered if | | | | Of course, neither auto-discovery nor manual |
| we could make it so easy that you wouldn't even | | | | submission guarantee pages will be added to the index. |
| have to tell us and every other search engine that | | | | The pages must meet our quality criteria for inclusion in |
| supports Sitemaps. But how? Well, every website can | | | | the index. And use of these submission methods does |
| have a robots.txt file in a standard location, so we | | | | not influence ranking. |
| decided to let you tell us about your Sitemap in the | | | | |