Sitemap Submission: A Thing of the Past

There was a time when it was a recommended practice to submit a sitemap of your site to search engines to help them better crawl your site. After today's announcement at SES, manual sitemap submission has become a thing of the past.

Competing search engines Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, and Ask have announced today their support for 'autodiscovery' of sitemaps. The newly announced autodiscovery method allows you to specify in your robot.txt file where your sitemap is located, and that's it, you're done.

Comprehensiveness and freshness are key initiatives for every search engine, and with autodiscovery of sitemaps, everyone wins:

- Webmasters save time with the ability to universally submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers.

- The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important.

- Searchers benefit from improved search experience with better comprehensiveness and freshness.

Note: Neither the autodiscovery nor the manual submission of a sitemap guarantees that the pages will be added to a search engine's index.

Enjoy the post? Here are some more that may interest you.

Zach Katkin - Running A Small Web Design Firm - theNapkin - Web Design, Internet Marketing, SEO, April 12, 2007: “No More Search Engine Submission” — A nice little find over at PronetAdvertising… Announced at SES (search engine strategies) manual submission of sitemaps is now a thing of the past. For those of you uninitiated, sitemaps are single files on your website that list every other page...
Affordable Internet Marketing Blog, May 1, 2007: “Sitemaps in robot.txt file” — If you use Sitemaps to getting your websites noticed, you know it’s always been a hassle to getting these sitemaps submitted and verified with the major search engines. They all used different formats. Not any more! Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Liv...

Jeremy Steele, April 11, 2007

In case anyone is wondering, just add "Sitemap: " then your sitemap URL to your robots.txt file.

Zach Katkin, April 12, 2007

As if it was around that long... this is a very nice initiative on the part of the search engines, saves a lot of time. But, it should be noted that installation and verification of sites through tools like Google Webmaster Tools is still very much needed and an important tool in an SEOs arsenal.

Zach Katkin, April 12, 2007

Do you know if or when the other methods of sitemap submission will be phased out, if at all?

AppleBot, April 12, 2007

So let's say my site is www.applebot.com and i have a sitemap here: www.applebot.com/sitemap.xml

in my robot.txt file

Sitemap: /sitemap.xml

Should it be like this?

Adrian Offerman, April 13, 2007

According to sitemaps.org that should do the job.

You can also ping you sitemap to every search engines by getting: /ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml Already works at Ask. Haven't tried yet whether others already implement this.

Adrian Offerman, April 13, 2007

URL didn't come through correctly, should be: <searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Fakhre, April 14, 2007

hy how can i submit or register my sitemap using robots.txt file. please tell me. i did write like Sitemap: http://www.kirayadaar.com/sitemap-kirayadaar.xml

was that right, where when i did check using some robots.txt file checker engine it returns with errors. so please solve this issue. thank you!

Mikhail Tuknov, April 17, 2007