Search engine giants team up on indexing

16 November 2006

Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are to work together to provide a service for webmasters looking to get their sites listed in search results, it has been announced.

Under the new agreement, all three search engine giants will use Google's Sitemaps product, which enables interested parties to check whether their webpages have been crawled by search engine spiders.Search engine optimisation has been widely acknowledged as a key part of the new era of internet technology, with businesses and social websites alike eager to increase traffic to their sites.

Other such products are also available from Yahoo! and MSN, but until now website owners have had to use each tool separately.

Hailing the "first joint and open initiative to improve the web crawl process", a joint statement said that the service would allow web users to "notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently, resulting in better representation in search indices".

However, the service, which involves webmasters submitting their own pages for assessment, does not in itself guarantee inclusion in search engine rankings.

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Category: Google, MSN, Natural search, Yahoo