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Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo announced today their support of autodiscovery of Sitemaps.
The new, open-format allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps withing their robots.txt file. This takes away the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately. Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about the pages that are on their sites, and are available for crawling. The new autodiscovery support is beneficial for both webmasters and those conducting search queries. Web pages must still adhere to the quality criteria for index inclusion, and utilizing autodiscovery does not affect a site's ranking.