Search Engine Optimisation – Sitemap Submissions

If you work in Search Engine Optimisation you’ll know it’s all about getting your website noticed by potential customers and search engines alike, and one way of doing this is through the creation and submission of sitemaps. The sitemap can be in either XML or HTML format and basically contains a list of all the pages within your website, along with links to each of these pages.

However, it’s always been a bit of hassle getting these sitemaps submitted and verified with the major search engines, as until recently they all supported different types of sitemaps meaning separate sitemaps had to be made. This problem was recently fixed amongst the 3 major search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) through the advent of the www.sitemaps.org intitiative whereby all 3 now accept the standard XML sitemap.

Anyway, I digress. As the title of this article suggests, sitemap submission just got a whole lot easier! Yahoo have been in discussions with Google and Microsoft and they have all agreed to accept links to sitemaps in the robots.txt file.

The robots.txt file is usually the first file checked on a website by search engine spiders and until recently was only used to list files and directories that search engines should not index. The url of the XML sitemap can now be added anywhere to the robots.txt file to be crawled in the following way:

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

This is a big step for the improvement of website indexing as it makes the whole process that little bit easier, and will hopefully lead to this being a standard practice followed by all search engines.

Rik Weber
SEO Consultant