Search engines agree on auto-discovering sitemap.xml

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all announced today that they will support the sitemap.xml format. Furthermore, you can now include a line in the robots.txt file that points the search engines to the URL of your sitemap. Now sitemaps will be auto-discovered by the engines and no longer require manual submission.

Within your robots.txt file, add the following line:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

I’ll post some results down the road when I get around to implementing this myself.