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Evidence of Yahoo Crawling Google Sitemaps
November 27, 2006
Given Yahoo's recent promise that it would begin to support the Google Sitemaps protocol, it's a bit anti-climactic to document evidence now, but I promised a follow-up.
Back in October, before the "big 3" officially admitted that they would read the same type of sitemap files as a benefit to site owners, I had my suspicions and ran a test to see if and when Yahoo would actually pull a URL from a Google sitemap and add it to the Yahoo index.
I created this orphan page and put it on the blog server. I added the URL to our Google Sitemap file and told Yahoo about the file via the YSE interface. Over Thanksgiving, using a text string query, I noticed that the file had been crawled by Slurp and was now appearing in the main Yahoo index:
Having been too busy to keep a close eye on it that week, I scurried over to YSE to check further and noticed that the file did indeed appear in the list of pages on our blog:
Note that the crawl date for the file - November 16 - is only a day after Yahoo announced its support for the protocol. That's impressive. I submitted the current sitemap file on November 7, and it was processed on the 8th. It's possible that my test file was crawled even before the 16th, since that's only the last crawled date - and I wasn't paying much attention to it during that week.
Regardless, hat's off to Yahoo for making good on their promise - and quickly.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at November 27, 2006 11:13 AM
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