Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo are uniting to build a common mechanism for website submission, simplifying the way webmasters notify search engines about their new sites.

The company's announced on Thursday their support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free, open standard for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensibly. The tool should allow websites to receive better representation in search indices.

Announcing industry supported Sitemaps is an important milestone for all of us because it will help webmasters and search engines get the most relevant information to users faster, said Narayanan Shivakumar, Distinguished Entrepreneur with Google.

Sitemaps address the challenges of a growing and dynamic Web by letting webmasters and search engines talk to each other, enabling a better web crawl and better results,

A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

More on the Web:

http://www.sitemaps.org

Google