Introducing Yahoo! Sitemaps

Yahoo! has copied Google Sitemaps by offering an easy way to submit all your Web pages. It's a simplified version of Google Sitemaps, a text file that contains a list of your site's URL's.

Previously, you could only submit your home page to Yahoo!. Now, however, in theory, Yahoo! knows about all your pages.

Like Google Sitemaps and any submission process, it does NOT guarantee that Yahoo! will crawl or index your pages, nor will it influence rankings for your keywords. But it sure is a great way to put all your pages in front of Yahoo! in a single submission!

Aside from a simpler format and lack of reporting (for now), the concept is the same as Google. They know a human with root access to your site is telling them about all the URL's. This saves a lot of submitting and spidering time. However, I still recommend that you submit your home page to Yahoo! in the normal way.

Creating and Submitting your Sitemaps File to Yahoo!

STEP 1: Create a text file (e.g. sitemap.txt) containing a list of your URL's, with one URL per line. If you have a site with hundreds or even thousands of pages, Yahoo! also recognizes compressed versions of this file (e.g. sitemap.gz).

Once created, upload this file to your domain root (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.txt). If you have more than one domain, simply create and upload a new Sitemap to each domain you want to submit.

STEP 2: Log into Yahoo!'s Free Submit page with your Yahoo! ID and Password at: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

If you don't have a Yahoo! account, or don't use Yahoo! Mail, you will need to create an account by clicking on the "Sign Up" link.

STEP 3: Submit your Yahoo! Sitemap URL by pasting the URL into the "Enter your URL" box. Repeat for each domain you have created a Sitemap for.

That's it... Nothing more to do except for updating this file each time you add or remove pages from your site, so to keep Yahoo! informed of the changes.