Search Engines Unite On Sitemaps Autodiscovery

Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of submitting web pages through feeds to the search engines. Today, the three are now joined by Ask.com in supporting the system and an extension of it called autodiscovery. This is where the major search engines will automatically locate your sitemaps file if the location is listed in a robots.txt file.

In the past, if you created a sitemaps file, you then had to manually tell the search engines where to find it. With today's announcement, search engines will check your robots.txt file for a link to a sitemaps file, then get the file from that location. This is a big plus because all the major search engines regularly check robots.txt files as part of their ordinary crawling.

To add the location, just put a line like this anywhere in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE
Replace the LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE with the actual location. For example, if www.jumphigherglobal.com has a sitemap file called sitemap.xml in top level, the reference would be like this:

Sitemap: http://www.jumphigherglobal.com/sitemap.xml

Have more than one sitemaps file? Ideally, you'd create a special "sitemaps index" file that links to all of them, then put a link to the sitemaps index file in your robots.txt file. If that sounds like too much work, you can have more than one sitemaps URL listed in the robots.txt file.

News source : searchengineland