Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

In breaking news from a a Google Press Release, they announce the first joint initiative by the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live) to support a single sitemap protocol. What can I say except it's about time. This will really simplify the process of creating a sitemap so the search engines can find and index all the pages of a site. I'm not jumping up and down because right now the sitemaps don't really seem to speed up the indexing process for most sites, but the concept is sound and I have high hopes that it will help simplify the process of getting every page of a site indexed by the search engines.

I guess Yahoo and Microsoft just figured, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em--at least on the issue of sitemaps.