Mountain, View, California-based Internet giant Google has updated the way its leading search engine finds  Web site information with a new automatic and more forgiving method for using the sitemap files many webmasters have in place, which are used to let Google and other search engines know about Web site content they might not otherwise find, Google announced Thursday. Submission Of XML And Other Sitemap Files Simplified The sitemap file standard was introduced by Google in 2005 as a way for webmasters to submit an XML (Extensible Markup Language) list of Web pages within a site to Google, and in 2006 rival search engine firms Yahoo and Microsoft began supporting the format, which can help search engines get a more accurate list of certain types of information on a site than is normally possible when an automated search engine crawler indexes a site. Google has changed the way it interprets sitemap files submitted by webmasters by automatically determining the type of data they contain, from a group of nine varieties supported by the search giant. "No longer do you have to specify the Sitemap file type—we'll determine the type of data you're submitting automatically," noted Google Trends analyst John Mueller of Google Zurich in a message announcing the change posted Thursday to the company's webmaster blog. Google Auto-Determining Nine Sitemap File Types With the changes announced Thursday webmasters were able to submit sitemap files listing video content, programming source code and other types without having to inform Google about the type of data each sitemap file contains, Google said. The types of sitemap files Google has begun automatically determining included the following:  | XML Sitemap files for web pages - Google's preferred format | | | RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds for web pages - Really Simple Syndication feed files | | | Text files with Web page URLs - Plain text files | | | XML Sitemap files for Video Search | | | Media-RSS feeds for Video Search - mRSS feeds | | | Google Code Search XML files | | | XML Sitemap files for mobile web pages - Data optimized for mobile devices | | | XML Sitemap files for geo-data - KML or GeoRSS geographically-tagged files | | | XML Sitemap files for News | Google Webmaster Tool Automatically Determines Sitemap File Types The newly-updated Google sitemap submission process can automatically determine whether a sitemap index file includes any of these types of data, and allows webmasters to send Google up to 1,000 sitemap files at once. "If you have multiple sitemap files that you wish to submit to Google, you can include up to 1,000 of these in an XML sitemap Index file," Mueller wrote in the Thursday announcement. Webmasters with larger Web sites were also able to take advantage of the new automated sitemap file type discovery feature. "If you have more than 1,000 sitemap files, you can just submit multiple sitemap Index files," Mueller added. Webmasters can submit sitemap files to Google using the company's collection of site owner utilities at its Webmaster Tools site, by identifying the sitemap files in their site's robots.txt file, or by setting up a so-called "HTTP ping" system with Google that will tell the search company whenever a sitemap file has been updated. The SearchEngineWorld chart below shows how Google searches for the term "sitemap" has increased in frequency since 2004.  The Thursday change to how Google identifies sitemap files was the latest move in the company's efforts to make it easier for those in charge of Web content to have their increasingly complex Web sites accurately indexed. Related Links:
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8:12 pm on Dec. 18, 2008 (utc 0)