The big search engines: Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search have announced that their crawlers can now find your sitemap if you specify it in your robots.txt file. The announcement was made during this year’s SES.
It is pretty easy to add in the auto discovery code. Simply add the following text to your robots.txt file:
Sitemap: sitemap_location
sitemap_location should of course point to the full URL of where you sitemap is located.
There you have it, no more manual submission is required 
Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?
April 11th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
[…] Big Search Engines Announce Sitemap… […]
April 12th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Kewel. Thanks for the info!
April 12th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe big search engines: Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search have announced that their crawlers can now find your sitemap if you specify it in your robots.txt file. The announcement was made during this year’s SES. … […]
April 17th, 2007 at 8:46 am
[…] about a great new feature being offered by Google, Microsoft, Ask, and Yahoo that allows you to specify a sitemap via your robots.txt file. According to a lot of people you should still initially ping the SEs with your sitemap, mostly to […]
April 25th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
[…] A week or so (probably been two weeks, time flies) I changed my robots.txt file to show the sitemap URL in it. […]