Ken Moss, General Manager, Live Search announced:
Today, we are excited to announce that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are coming together in support of the SiteMaps protocol. The goal of this effort is to improve search results for customers around the world. This protocol enables site owners everywhere to tell search engines about the content on their site instead of having to rely solely on crawl algorithms to find it.
Sitemaps.org is the official website. From the website:
Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver, you submit it to search engines that support the Sitemaps protocol.
You can also submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request (replace
with the URL provided by the search engine):
/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url For example, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz, your URL will become:
/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:
/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gz
Google and Yahoo! both posted about this too.
WebProNews also published a nice PubCon video with Vanessa Fox (Google Search) and Tim Mayer (Yahoo! Search). What strikes me out is that those two guys, Vanessa and Tim are talking about a Google-Yahoo! thing, not a Google-Yahoo!-MSN thing. So what’s the deal after all ? Is Microsoft in it or not ? They say they are on their blog.
Via Seopedia Forum.
Could this be the birth of colaborative competition?
Could the fierce competition between this three behemonts stop here? Maybe…maybe not.
Microsoft is out of it’s league here. That interview taken at PubCon sais it all. Not a single word about Microsoft in there, altough officially, three engines made this.
“So what’s the deal after all ? Is Microsoft in it or not ? They say they are on their blog.”
According to official announcements, they are. But why discuss it when Microsoft is not there? In the end, the three companies are still competing against each other. Therefore, they’ll want to appear self-promotional — and as Microsoft wasn’t there to say anything, why should the other companies put any emphasis on Microsoft?
Even if Microsoft was not at the interview table, let me quote their discussion:
“Yeah .. Google and Yahoo! have decided to team up and make this ……”
Microsoft should have been mentioned there, at least from fairplay, even if a representative wasn’t at the table.
Everybody accuses Microsoft that it’s not playing fair… but as Cristian said, once you make a team, it’s not right to take full credit for everything, so Yahoo and Google is not playing fair neither. And by the way, the Yahoo guy, mentions Google first in the list of search engines adopting this sitemap protocol. So how about that?
Another explanation could be that Microsoft decided to join this team right after the interview. Right?
I think Google had the sitemap idea first so credit to them for getting everybody on board.
The search results from Yahoo! and Google are already very similar, this will make them even more similar.
well i really don’t know how much microsoft is game for sitema because as far as i think msn se algo doesn’t support typicall .xml sitemap..if yes then gud news
AB
It’s baffling to me that MSN is so large, well funded, and has tons of smart people…but is so far behind Google & Yahoo in the search landscape. Why weren’t they represented in this interview session?
Shimon, even if they were not represented, why didn’t ther other say at least a word about them too ? :)
well i guess shimon is right..MSN is too large but no body knws how to write the right algo.. if google & yahoo can write why can’t MSN..but let’s not go out of the track..if sitemap accepted by MSN..then it’s a gud news..we all can fetch more money by selling ranking services
It’s good that the Big Players are following the tendencies set by websites. After all a search engine prime role is to give you the right answer to the question you asked.
They can’t make you ask only the questions they know to answer, and they can’t force you to use only the methodes they use for indexing a website.
I have tried a tool that generates sitemaps according to the sitemaps.org protocol and I realy liked it. Comparing to the others it is realy stable on huge (and with a poor structure) websites.
http://gsitecrawler.com/
If you have any problems to create XML sitemap files for your sites, 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 Ask.com and MSN.com), site crawler for adding an URLs into the sitemap and Yahoo Index viewer.
Arthur, next time I won’t approve such commercial comments.
Please remember that.