Some months ago Google, Live.com and Yahoo! have teamed up to support sitemaps as an industry standard, that makes it easy for webmasters to get their content to all search engines quickly. Today, they have announced a new addition to their service, called Auto-Discover. You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a robots.txt file. To do this, simply add the following line:
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>
The <sitemap_location> should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn’t matter where you place it in your file. If you have a Sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You don’t need to list each individual Sitemap listed in the index file.
In addition to this, Ask.com is now also supporting Sitemaps.
April 11th, 2007
Google today announced that on May 31, 2007, Google offices in ten countries will host Google Developer Day, a global event featuring workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions on Google’s APIs and developer tools.
Focusing on the theme “Building Blocks for Better Web Applications,” Google Developer Day will explore innovative uses of Google developer products to create and enhance applications, integrate with Google services and reach millions of users on Google and beyond.
Google Developer Day will take place at Google offices and offsite locations in Mountain View, Sao Paulo, Madrid, London, Paris, Hamburg, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney. The proceedings will begin in Sydney on May 31, 9 a.m. AEST and end 27 hours later in Mountain View on May 31, 7 p.m. PDT.
Google engineers and product experts at each location will lead sessions in topic areas such as, “Developing with Geo: Google Maps, Google Earth and SketchUp,” “Tools for Better Web Development: The Google Web Toolkit, Open Source and Other Developer Initiatives” and “Mashups and More: AJAX, Google Gadgets and the Google Data APIs.”
To reach developers everywhere, Google will offer live streaming webcasts from its Mountain View office and provide a YouTube channel with videos of Google Developer Day sessions around the world.
For registration and additional information, see the Google Developer Day website: http://www.google.com/events/developerday.
April 11th, 2007
