Live Search Now Supporting Sitemaps Autodiscovery Via Robots.txt File

Jul 25, 2007 at 9:28am ET by Barry Schwartz

This morning I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Microsoft Live Search is finally now supporting sitemaps via autodiscovery.

Microsoft will only use your sitemaps file if it is listed in your robots.txt file. You cannot currently ping Microsoft or upload your sitemaps file to Microsoft.

Microsoft, along with Ask.com, Google and Yahoo, united to support autodiscovery of sitemaps in April. Google, Yahoo and Ask.com quickly supported it on that day or soon after. Microsoft finally began supporting the reading of these sitemaps files as of yesterday.

How do you specify the location of your Sitemaps file in your robots.txt file? Just add a line like this:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

Replace the <sitemap_location> with the absolute URL for the file.

More details at Sitemaps.org.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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