Ask joins Google, Microsoft, Yahoo in Sitemaps Autodiscovery

According to a blog entry by Infrastructure Product Manager Vivek Pathak, Ask.com has joined Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! in supporting the autodiscovery of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. Nevertheless, Ask.com is also supporting manual submissions of Sitemaps. Autodiscovery of sitemaps has the following advantages:

• Webmasters save time with the ability to universally submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers
• The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important
• Searchers benefit from improved search experience with better comprehensiveness and freshness