In November 2006, Google, Yahoo! and MSN joined forces to support a new industry standard for sitemaps: Sitemaps 0.90 (see MSN announcement here). As long as webmasters follow the protocol, they can ensure their sites are fully and consistently indexed across all the major search engines (a real step forward). This article is important for all those with missing or poorly ranked pages.

The official site for the joint venture is at http://www.sitemaps.org/ and contains a lot of info about the new standard and it’s syntax. What the site singularly fails to do is explain correctly how to submit your sitemap to the big three! The format suggested on the site of:

http://search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=your sitemap_url

does not currently work at any of the three sites! Until it does, this blog page provides instructions for how to (a) create your sitemap and (b) how to submit to each of the three search engines… [Read more...]