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

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

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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.

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
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

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

Well, the decision is taken : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot. ... tocol.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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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 ) ?

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

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 :

Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver, you submit it to search engines that support the Sitemaps protocol. The search engines can then retrieve your Sitemap and make the URLs available to their crawlers. Refer to each search engine's documentation for more information about submitting to them. You can also submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request (replace <searchengine_URL> with the URL provided by the search engine):
Issue your request to the following URL:

<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

this means www.msn.com/ping?sitemap=www.example.com%2Fsitemaps.xml

as I think url encoding is necessary (%2F stands for "/").

And the same with Yahoo!

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dcz wrote:as I think url encoding is necessary (%2F stands for "/").

You're thinking well...
The same FAQ point (just one line more that what you quoted) says :

URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:

<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gz

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. ?

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

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

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

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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