Search engine rivals Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are working together to make it easier for Web site owners to make sure their sites get included in the Web indexes.

The three major companies are adopting Google's Sitemaps protocol, available since June 2005, that allows webmasters to manually feed their pages to Google and to check whether their sites have been crawled and they had to follow similar processes at each of the search engines separately.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.
"In the first joint and open initiative to improve the Web crawl process for search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft today announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites."

The manual web page submission process supplements the traditional web crawling but does not automatically guarantee that the pages will be included in a search engine's index.

Webmasters will be able now to go to a single place to alert the search engines about their web pages, something they have been requesting for a long time, said Tim Mayer, director of product management at Yahoo Search.

The effort was initially started by Google and Yahoo. "We thought it would be great for publishers and webmasters to be able to submit their content in one format for all the different search engines," Mayer said.

"Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering more relevant search results so they can find what they're looking for faster," said Ken Moss, general manager of Windows Live Search at Microsoft.

written by Cristian L.