MSN and Yahoo! start using the Google sitemaps protocol

dcz

Great news,

MSN and Yahoo! are joining Google sitemap in officially supporting the Sitemap protocol.

A new web site was started : http://www.sitemaps.org/

This mean, one sitemap submission will be enough for all three search engine Very Happy

Our coming soon sitemaps solution will be more useful than ever before Very Happy

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nims

Great news and lets all hope that now all the major search engines will index our web pages in more or less the same way so that we do not have to worry about optimising our website differently for different Search engines.

dcz

Well, indexing is something slightly different from being first on the SERPs, which is as well different from visits brought to your web-site.

So the good thing is, yahoo! and msn should index our web site better, but we still have to wait and see a bit how it goes.
I am not sure Yahoo! will spider new web site faster thanks to the sitemap system. I mean, unless they plan to lower their directory submission fee Wink

MSN should, if it makes it, index a lot more pages. I say if, with little sarcasm thinking about the high page loading time they usually have on SERPs, and at the 21th page's bug.

Actually, I am not sure sitemap sharing will jeopardize Google #1 position after this if you know what I mean, but let's hope the other two will do a better job thanks to once again Google Laughing

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nims

Ok got it.
Is there any news available on when are they planning to start this.

dcz

Well, the decision is taken : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/11/joint-support-for-sitemap-protocol.html

And there is already a way to ping all search engines : http://www.sitemaps.org/faq.html#faq_after_submission

So I guess it's already working, but I did not test yet.

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nims

Ok if its working ( as you say ) then how and where can we submit our sitemaps to yahoo and MSN. Shud we submit the same stiemap that we submitted to google ( generated by google sitemaps MOD ) ?

Peter77

That is very good news. so MSN and Yahoo have decided to play 'Follow the leader' Wink

. Last month or so I submitted my mx Google sitemap to Yahoo and submited it to Yahoo's Site Explorer and it processed it with no problem. Could it be, since Google seems to be taking it's time, that it's the reason why Yahoo has the most back links to my site? Maybe Razz

dcz

Well, yahoo and Google do not use the same criteria to count backlinks.

Yahoo seems to count them all, which does not mean they are weighting the same in the average, and Google knows about a lot more links than it considers backlinks.

These two approaches could en up being very similar, it's just the publicly outputted total that changes.

And nims, as they say at sitemaps.org :

gowap · phpBB SEO Team Joined: 07 May 2006 Posts: 1005

nims

I am confused.
What/where will my sitemap ? I am using your mx google sitemaps and my forum url is http://www.newindianmodels.com/forum/

What exactly do I need to do ... the encoding etc. ?

dcz

It should be :
-www.searchengine_url.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newindianmodels.com%2Fsitemaps.xml

in your case.

But it does not seem to work yet, I think the service is not fully opened yet.

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nims

Is it sitemap.php or sitemap.xml ???

dcz

sitemaps.xml is the mod rewritten URL for sitemap.php.

In this case it does not really matter, but if you took the time to mod rewrite the Google sitmaps links, then, go for sitemaps.xml Wink

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nims

I checked , I did mod rewrite and its fine, but I have submitted/sitemap.php to google and yahoo. Hope its not a problem.

dcz

Nope, actually, you can even resubmit the sitemaps.xml if you prefer.

Google is for sure fully accepting the .php and .php?var=xx standard in sitemaps URLs, I am not sure about Yahoo!, but it should be the same.

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