YAHOO and MSN Search have decided to support the popular format for XML-Sitemaps which was invented by Google in 2005.
This is good news if you use the AllWebMenus “Google Sitemap” feature, as you will now enjoy its benefits in the other major search engines too. Apart from the YAHOO and MSN Search, this will also have an effect to many other search engines that will adopt this format.
In an encouraging act of collaboration, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced tonight that they will all begin using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web. Now based at Sitemaps.org, the system instructs web masters on how to install an XML file on their servers that all three engines can use to track updates to pages. This should make it easier to get your pages indexed in a simple and standardized way. People who use Google Sitemaps don’t need to change anything, those maps will now be indexed by Yahoo and Microsoft.
The protocol is offered under an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License, so it can be used by any search engine, derivative variations using the same license can be created and it can be used for commercial purposes.
Source: TechCrunch