Interesting news out today that Google, Yahoo, and Micro$oft agreed to a protocol called sitemaps for sites to be able to communicate to search engines how they want their sites indexed, what content is updated, etc. (The normal approach is to spider, or crawl the site from one link to the next). Now, there’s a standard, formal approach. It makes sense: we get around on the net by searching, and now a site can say “Hey! Search engine! This is what content I have, this is what’s important, here’s what changed since you were last here”. More efficient for sure. Whether it impacts SEO (search engine optimization - trying to get the link to your page to show up first for certain keywords) remains to be seen.
sitemaps.org - Home