One of the more interesting developments in search engine indexing of websites in this "web 2.0" era has been the advent of the sitemap — a special file listing all website urls, maintained by the website's own administrator. With dynamically generated content being added and updated constantly, it only made sense to help out the search engines, to make sure that they didn't miss anything. The only catch was that they all had their standards.

Now they've finally united:

In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Marshall Kirkpatrick adds:

Any time competitors agree on open standards, that’s an enabler of further innovation and something to celebrate. It’s also great to see Creative Commons receiving all the more validation.

This is good news for people with Drupal-powered websites, for the contributed module Google Sitemap does the proper indexing automatically already — only now Yahoo and Microsoft will read that file, too!

— meaning it's a good day to be a Drupalista!

Site owners may want to make sure their sitemaps aren't missed by submitting their sitemaps to Yahoo and Microsoft and help them (and themselves) out.

[Added hat tip to Danny Sullivan.]

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