Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

Google released their Sitemaps protocol a while back, and soon after that released a beta of their Webmasters tools. Shortly after the introduction of Google Sitemaps, the other big search engines announced that they would all support the sitemap protocol.

Since then, I have been submitting sitemaps of my personal sites as well as many of the sites we build at work. While there has never been a guarantee that using a sitemap would improve search engine rankings or even that every page in a site will be indexed, it hasn’t hurt things either. One of the features I have enjoyed looking at is query stats. Who knew that my site is the #7 result on average when someone searches for “florabama“.

Anyway, today Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask.com annouced that they will support autodiscovery of sitemap files. Simply put the full URL of your sitemap.xml file in your robots.txt file and thats it.

Update: Here is a link to the Google Webmasters Blog post about this as well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at April 12,2007 @ 9:15 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.