Would you be surprised if I told you that Pepsi and Coke were working together on a new drink?  What about Microsoft and Apple creating a joint operating system together?  Or McDonald's and Burger King's new McWhopper?

Ok… none of that is true.

But equally as surprising to some, Yahoo! and Windows Live search announced their intent to join forces with Google in support of the Google-created Sitemap protocol.  Google has used the protocol since last year to allow website owners to feed a complete listing of their site's URLs to Google crawler.  Sitemaps allow the crawler to more effectively and completely index your website.

Google's Announcement  |  Yahoo's Announcement  |  Live's Announcement

This is huge news for website owners everywhere!  Using the Sitemap protocol, website owners can create a single file and upload it to all three search engines.  As of now, each search engine has its own submission guidelines and websites.  But who knows… perhaps in the future that, too, will be integrated between search engines.  The Sitemaps service is free and easy to use.  Several server applications and scripts already exist to create sitemaps for you.  Of course, there's always the manual way too.

I've personally used the Sitemaps feature Google has offered.  It took about 10 minutes to create and upload the sitemap.  Google had it verified shortly thereafter and to my surprise (and delight), I've seen the Google crawler back at my site every day since.

Now I can steer Yahoo! and Live to my sitemap as well.  Does it get any easier than this?

Sitemap Protocol Website  |  Google Sitemaps  |  Yahoo! Sitemaps  |  Live Sitemaps