It will be interesting to run those analytics after today and see how Cyber Monday 2008 stacks up.

Today, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! together are announcing support of autodiscovery of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. Source : ASK.com

It works !

Prior to this announcement I had setup a couple of new blogs. I added the xml sitemap autodiscovery option to the robots.txt file and it appears that it helped get these sites listed in the search engines. Up until this point I had no problems getting indexed accordingly with Google, the other 3 were very inconsistent. I have seen an increase in crawling and traffic from ASK, MS and Yahoo for each site that I have included the autodiscovery tag.

This list will certainly grow quickly, especially if I add all the blogs that I read on a daily basis.

I start with the standard Date and name based permalink, then replace the ending slash with the html extension.

Now the clock starts to see how long before it is included in the Google Index. Typically this timeframe is about 2 to 3 days.

I have been using this product since it’s first release and there just isn’t an easier or more effective way to create a sitemap.