When we first teamed up with Google and Yahoo to support sitemaps as an industry standard, it was with the express intention of driving the protocol forward. Making it into a simple, effective way to tell all search engines about the structure of your site.
Today, I'm happy to announce the latest addition to the protocol: Sitemap Autodiscovery. Autodiscovery gives siteowners the ability to easily share their sitemaps with all search engines at once, without the overhead of manually submitting them to each one. In order to share your sitemap with the crawlers at large, you simply provide the following line in your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>
Where <sitemap_location> is the complete URL of your Sitemap Index File (or your sitemap file, if you don't have an index file). This directive is independent of the user-agent. so as long as it is present in the robots.txt file, all engines will be able to find your sitemaps. I see this as an important extension to the protocol, as it removes the need to individually submit sitemaps to each engine - simply add one line to your robots.txt file, and we will find your new and updated sitemaps automatically.
Although we aren't ready to start consuming sitemaps quite yet, I encourage you to build a sitemap and add the "sitemap" directive to your robots.txt. As soon as we roll out support (before the end of the year), we will be able to start crawling your sitemap files immediately. If you want more detail on the sitemaps protocol, including autodiscovery, check out www.sitemaps.org.
As always, we are eager to hear your feedback and suggestions. Please send them our way using this link.
Brent Hands, Program Manager, Live Search
PingBack from http://www.seo-scoop.com/2007/04/11/sitemap-autodiscovery-for-the-big-4-via-robotstxt/
So you're announcing the second level of sitemaps integration and you haven't even integrated the first steps? I appreciate that you are trying to be standards-conform, but it doesn't help much if it isn't actually used anywhere. It's just plain frustrating to see how everyone else is jumping forwards and .... leaving you behind. Is there any hope? :-(
The big search players Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN together announced they’ll be adding a new way [...]
Tout chaud, tout beau. Il est maintenant possible d'indiquer automatiquement à Google, Yahoo et MSN (et même Ask) l'emplacement du fichier sitemap par l'intermédiaire du fichier robots.txt : Sitemap:
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
各大搜索引擎都发布了对网站地图的新的支持方式，就是在robots.txt文件里直接包括sitemap文件的链接。 就像这样： Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml 目前对此表示支持的搜索引擎公司有Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN。 而中文搜索引擎公司，显然不在这个圈子内。 这样做的好处就是，站长不用到每个搜索引擎的站长工具或者相似的站长部分，去提交自己的sitemap文件，搜索引擎的蜘蛛自己就会抓取robots.txt文件，读取其中的sitemap路径，接着抓取其中相链接的网页。
Last November, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo united to support sitemaps, a standardized method of [...]
thank you veryy much...veryy veryy much nice.....
so where can we upload or ping our sitemaps now?
If for some reason people do not want to use the robots.txt method, is there another place (ala yahoo site explorer or google webmaster tools) to inform you guys of a sitemap file?
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Finally you did something with sitemaps! :)
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Thank you for doing this! However, isn't it strange to make the announcement, when your service is not yet actually supporting sitemaps?
I guess it's a way to reinforce the fact that you *do* care about webmasters, you're just taking a while to play catchup. (Disabling the Link: function on the search engine wasn't such a great way to show your love, however!)
All told, I'm glad to know that sitemaps will be supported on Live Search before the dawn of January 1, 2008. Can I quote you on that?
Gradiva Couzin
http://www.yourseoplan.com/