Playing with Sitemaps

Based on my last post regarding MSN Webmaster Tools and such, I spent part of the weekend looking in to sitemaps, and I learned a bit that many of you may already know. Google, as it turns out, actually agreed with Ask, Yahoo! and MSN on something, they agreed on sitemap protocol. They have all followed the template put forth by sitemaps.org regarding formatting and syntax.

With that being said, it means that a single sitemap will actually be accepted by those four search engines. Three of them actually have automated methods of accepting sitemaps following the siemaps.org protocol as well.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=url of sitemap - works for ask.com
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=url of sitemap - works for MSN Live
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=url of sitemap - works for Yahoo

Pretty cool, huh?

Live and Google both have their own set of webmaster tools which manages sitemaps and a plethora of other things. Ask has no tools that I have found, but does have the automated site submission mentioned above. Yahoo has their "site explorer" which I find lackluster at best from my current vantage point, but I do intend to study it a bit closer in the next few days, so stay tuned.