10e20 Blog

Often times in the SEO business and even in personal website endeavors, we run into the question of why only some pages are indexed in the search engine results and others not. Waiting is a big deal — returns just never seem immediate. We wonder how to make our pages indexed faster and consider submitting directly to the search engine to expedite the crawl. We wonder when the site is finally partially indexed if Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft will ever reach those pages that are clearly linked on a page that was already indexed. We realize that there’s more we can do but wonder what format in which a site should be submitted to each individual search engine and we curse under our breaths because the format requirements were different for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. (Didn’t we just design a site and already deal with formatting inconsistencies between Internet Explorer and Firefox? Why this?!)

While not a cure-all and not an on-demand tool, Sitemaps, which are XML files that list the URLs of a site, have come to the aid of webmasters, facilitating communication between them and the search engines. Previously different across all search engines, the Sitemaps protocol will now be consistent across the three search engines, making submitting your website much easier. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have already posted blogs about it.

Thankfully, if you already have a Google sitemap created, you need not do anything — Microsoft and Yahoo will be using the same standard.

The official page discussing this unification is located at Sitemaps.org. While these three search engines are currently the only participants, other search engines are invited to participate under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License which encourages sharing and redistribution under certain conditions.

The announcement was made today at the Pubcon conference in Las Vegas. Danny Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Watch, has posted the official announcement.

This is a great stride for search engines and is excellent news for the webmaster who has had to be overly concerned with different standards. Hopefully, we’ll see more standard unifications in the future.