Have you been using Google Sitemaps? Now is a good time to use it since the news came out. All 3 search engines are adopting the same Web index tool where we just need to go to one place to alert each of them.

Search engine rivals Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up to make it easier for Web site owners to make sure their sites get included in the Web indexes, the companies are expected to announce Thursday.

The companies are adopting Google’s Sitemaps protocol, available since June 2005, which enables Web site owners to manually feed their pages to Google and to check whether their sites have been crawled. Web site owners have had to follow similar processes at each of the other major search engines separately.

Now Web site owners will be able to go to one place for alerting all three major search engines to their Web pages, something they have been requesting for some time, said Tim Mayer, director of product management at Yahoo Search.

I was trying to verify my website in Google Sitemaps but the verifying service was down. I guess the news had made all webmasters rushing to add their sites in Google Sitemaps until their server overloaded? haha~

Source:CNET news