Google, along with Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com have all agreed to a common method for Sitemaps Auto Discovery. What this allows us as webmasters to do is to create a Sitemap and then simply provide a link to it in our robots.txt file.

To enable Sitemaps Auto Discovery for your website or blog, simply add the following line to your robots.txt file. Of course, you’ll have to replace the actual link with the link to your sitemap xml file:

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

I find it great that the big search engines are all working together to standardize this simple process. What I hope will follow is that every other smaller search engine will also support the sitemaps protocol so our websites will all be crawled faster, leading to faster indexing. Advancements such as this just make basic search engine optimization work easy for you and me so we don’t need to consult so called seo professionals to submit our sitemaps and other trivial tasks.

For those of you using WordPress as your blogging platform, and you are already using the WordPress Google Sitemaps Generator plug-in to create your sitemap then this quick change to your robots.txt file will help keep the search engine crawlers updated with your newest sitemaps file.

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