Much welcomed news that the trio of top search engine hitters, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are agreeing on common specs for sitemaps to be listed. This will make it easier for webmasters to publish a single document that all three engines can interpret and act upon to index the site better. Robots.txt is a document telling search engines what directories not to index where sitemaps tells the engines the opposite.

Hopefully all — or at least most — search engines will adopt this free sitemap protocol.