Google has launched a new way for Webmasters to communicate their sitemaps back to them. Previously, Webmasters had to manually submit or “ping” the search engines. They would make one file, but still would have to submit to various engines. Now, improvements have been made. All they have to do is specify a line that is the sitemap and a location in the robots file and all engines will automatically find the needed file. In an interview for Webpronews at the SES conference in New York, Google’s Vanessa Fox talked with Rand Rishkin of seomoz.org about this matter.

“We still recommend that at least initially that you submit to one of the engines that has a mechanism that you can find out if your sitemap has any errors; otherwise, if you only have it in your robots file, you’re not going to actually see it. You’ll never know if it’s actually accepted or not. Yeah, cause we’re not going to report that information back through the tools so you can think that your sitemap is totally fine; and we’re not going to send that information back and so then you’ll just never know. So, we still recommend that you submit just once so that we can see if it’s ok.”

Ask.com announced their support for sitemaps and they will be picking up the sitemaps through a robots file. In addition to that, they also introduced a ping mechanism.

Other search engines are now using additional tools in their Webmaster control, which poses competition for Google. Yahoo has updated and is now offering these modifications. Vanessa Fox told us she believes this to be a good move.
“I think it’s great. I think it gives people, you know, insights into how their sites are doing in the various indexes.”

If everyone adds these tools, we will all benefit, because we will be getting the most information possible.