Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, sitting in a tree….

k-i-s-s-i-n-g?  At least over sitemaps, they are.  Will it matter?

Yahoo announces:

“Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft join forces (really !!) behind Sitemaps

The best part about to-do lists is when you get to cross something off, and today we can cross one more from the list of feedback we have collected from webmasters. You have asked us to support a single format for submission and today we want to talk about how we are teaming up with Google and Microsoft to support Sitemaps 0.90.

Together we’re announcing www.sitemaps.org, which provides details of the current release of the Sitemaps protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate on this common protocol. By offering an open standard for web sites, webmasters can use a single format to create a catalog of their site URLs and to notify changes to the major search engines. This should make is easier for web sites to provide search engines with content and metadata. And in turn, search engines can spend less time crawling unchanged pages and can update indexes faster as new content is discovered. This will help us reflect the changes more quickly, and improve our ability to provide more timely and relevant search results for users. Sitemaps is available to any site owner who wishes to communicate more easily with participating search engines. Simply create and upload an XML Sitemap and submit the URL of the file to search engines.”