Google Sitemaps becomes the standard

Microsoft and Yahoo will adopt the Google Sitemaps protocol in the future for real time Web Sites indexing.

For instance, only Google was using an XML protocol to submit Web Site changes to a search engine. Yahoo used a plain text sitemap protocol, i.e. a simple text file containing the Web Site URL list.

Now, both Microsoft and Yahoo will use the Google Sitemap protocol for their search engines Windows Live and Yahoo.

The adoption of the Google Sitemaps protocol by Yahoo and Microsoft makes easy for webmasters to communicate to all major search engines on the Web using the same data format.

A new web site dedicated to the Sitemaps protocol has been launched.