Google Sitemaps protocol, a year-old indexing tool, will become the standard for all three companies.
Website operators can use the indexing tool to manually feed their sites to Google and then check to see if their sites have been crawled. Yahoo and Microsoft have similar products, but the decision to unify efforts will allow webmasters to cut down on duplicated efforts, according to Yahoo Director of Product Management Tim Mayer.
“We thought it would be great for publishers and webmasters to be able to submit their content in one format for all the different search engines," Mayer said. "We are proposing the format together and inviting other search engines to adopt it."
According to Mayer, the initial idea came out of cooperation between Yahoo and Google, with Microsoft joining soon after to launch the triumvirate.
"Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering more relevant search results so they can find what they're looking for faster," Windows Live Search General Manager Ken Moss said. "I am sure this will be the first of many industry initiatives you will see us working and collaborating on."
Manual webpage submission is a supplement to the traditional web crawling method.