Live Search Now Supporting Sitemaps Autodiscovery Via Robots.txt File

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 […]

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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.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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