At this week’s PubCon show in Las Vegas on Thursday, all three of the big search engines united to announce they will all being using the same protocol to index sites on the Web.

Here’s what the press release said: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft today announced support for Sitemaps 0.90, a free and easy way for webmasters to notify search engines about their websites and be indexed more comprehensively and efficiently, resulting in better representation in search indices. For users, Sitemaps enables higher quality, fresher search results. An initiative initially driven by Yahoo and Google, Sitemaps builds upon the pioneering Sitemaps 0.84, released by Google in June of 2005, which is now being adopted by Yahoo and Microsoft to offer a single protocol to enhance Web crawling efforts.

According to a post from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch, “Anyone already using Google Sitemaps needn’t do anything different.” The only change is now Microsoft and Yahoo will read those sitemaps, as well.

The good thing about this is that developers will only have one mechanism to support.

Let me know what this means to you. lisap@reveneutoday.com