Update on Sitemaps for Google, MSN, Yahoo

About ten days ago, I posted about an agreement between Google, Yahoo and Live Search (MSN) to support a common format of XML sitemap. This is a common protocol sitemap that you can submit to all three search engines to help ensure your pages get crawled and indexed.

But it seems there's some confusion over where you go to submit your new sitemap to MSN. To submit a sitemap to Google, you use Google Sitemaps (same place as always). To submit to Yahoo, you go to Yahoo Site Explorer. But the current question is, how do you submit your sitemap to MSN?

Ironically, I stumbled across this forum post on the subject while trying to find out for myself. I submitted my sitemap to Google, no problem. Then I figured out how to submit to Yahoo Site Explorer. But for MSN, I've come up empty so far.

My guess is that, for the time being, you just have to bank on the MSN Bot finding the sitemap on its own by crawling your site.

Bottom line ... I wouldn't worry too much about it. But I'll keep you posted all the same.

Until next time...

-Austin SEO Guy