XML Sitemap Autodiscovery
Written by alex on June 23rd, 2007In April 2007, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo announced the support of autodiscovery for the sitemap protocol. Using the Robots.txt file you can add a line to allow the search engines to auto discover your sitemap.
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.