By: Deepti Jain

In November 2006, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support the Sitemap protocol. The Sitemap protocol is a standard that can help you to submit all of your web pages to search engines.

Last week, Ask.com joined the team so that now all four major search engines support the Sitemap protocol. In addition, search engines can now automatically detect your Sitemaps file.

What are sitemaps and what is the official Sitemaps protocol?

A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

Read the rest of this entry »