Google/Yahoo/Ask/Microsoft Combine On Sitemaps Autodiscovery

The four big players in search, Google, Yahoo, Ask and Windows Live Search, have announced they will be supporting an easy way for websites to provide a sitemap for their crawlers. Previously, if you wanted to submit a sitemap (a file telling search spiders what pages are on your site, and when they were updated) to Google, you’d have to create a Google Account, log in to a webmaster control panel, set up your sitemap, and hope to god you did everything right.
And then, presumably, repeat another time for every subsequent search engine.
Now, just add a line to your robots.txt file. The like just has to start with “Sitemap: ” and end with the URL of your sitemap. Damn, damn, damn easy. Every search engine even wrote a blog post about it:
Google
Yahoo
Ask.com
Windows Live Search
None of the blog posts are particularly remarkable, except Microsoft’s, which admits […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg