Search Marketing Blog
Ask.com Adds Autodiscovery Support for XML Sitemaps
Posted by Kent Schnepp on 07.17.2007
Search Engine Land reports that Ask.com is officially implementing support for XML sitemaps. The following is from Ask.com’s Webmaster Help section:
Q: Does Ask.com support sitemaps?
A: Yes, Ask.com supports the open-format Sitemaps protocol. Once you have prepared the sitemap, add the sitemap auto-discovery directive to robots.txt as follows:SITEMAP: http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml
The sitemap location should be the full sitemap URL. Alternatively, you can also submit your sitemap through the ping URL:
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml
Please note that sitemap submissions do not guarantee the indexing of URLs. To learn more about the protocol, please visit the Sitemaps web site at http://www.sitemaps.org.
This is great news, as it is one more search engine to abide by a standard XML sitemap authentication protocol. Hopefully, MSN will follow Ask.com’s lead.
