Also, Google, Yahoo, MSN announced auto-discovery for sitemaps through robots.txt. In April 2007, Ask.com and IBM announced support for Sitemaps. The schema version was changed to 'Sitemap 0.90', but no other changes were made. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol in November 2006. Google first introduced Sitemaps 0.84 in June 2005 so web developers could publish lists of links from across their sites. The Sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content.

It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs of the site. Sitemaps is a protocol in XML format meant for a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for web crawling. ( March 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help rewrite this article from a descriptive, neutral point of view, and remove advice or instruction. This article is written like a manual or guidebook.