Previously you read about that fact that Yahoo & Google had agreed on the Site Map standard; ie a Site Map file specially made for the search engine bots, usually an XML file, telling them the address of each page, when it was added, etc.
Since I blogged about that the Big 2 search engines were joined by Ask and MSN, making it more or less a clean sweep of major search engines. There may be some small holdouts out there, but they’re fringe players at best. What that means is that if you weren’t using these Site Maps before, you had better start now. You know what happens to people who don’t use the standards Bill Gates does…
A new development has happened that has made this standard even easier to use. Previously you had to go to Yahoo and/or Google and tell them where exactly the Site Map was located. In other words you had to give them the URL. I’m not sure why exactly they couldn’t find it themselves. It’s is right up there with why can’t Google understand that MySite.com & www.MySite.com are the same site? Still, they did get around to fixing the Site Map dilemma. Here’s what you do.
In your Robots.txt file, put this line:
Sitemap: LOCATION-OF-SITEMAPS-FILE
Using our previous example, you’d put:
Sitemap: http://www.MySite.com/sitemap.xml
You can give your site map a different name then sitemap.xml, but keeping it that way – simple and to the point – may be your best bet. I suggest you do this as soon as possible, even if you’ve told Google & Yahoo where the file is already. You never know what’s going to happen. Besides, as this makes it way across the Internet, to the other 1% not dominated by the Big 4, it’ll do you good. No need to thank me. I’m just doing my job.