The big search players Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN together announced they’ll be adding a new way for you to tell them where you store your Sitemap XML file. Just add a line like this one in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

As Sitemaps.org explains, Sitemaps are a way to tell search engines of your URLs to help their crawlers index them. I can’t find any use for investing the extra work of preparing a Sitemap myself, because search engines already discover linked content fine. (I did submit the blog’s RSS file to Google’s Webmaster tools, though.)

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