Microsoft, Yahoo and Microsoft have all agreed on the Sitemaps .90 Protocol, that lets web site owners and web publishers easily inform search engines about their pages.

“We just wanted to make it easy for the site owners to have one file they could maintain on the site,” says Vanessa Fox, product manager for Webmaster Central at Google.

A Sitemap is simply an XML file that describes a Web site’s file and directory structure. Beyond identifying fresh content for search engines, Sitemaps help save bandwidth for publishers and search engines alike by avoiding unnecessary crawls to identify new or changed files. In our experience adding an XML sitemap to your website rapily increases your chances of being indexed correctly and ranking well on the Search Engines.

Read the Full Article - News by InformationWeek

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