Donna Fontenot at SEO Scoop picked up the announcement that Yahoo and MSN are now supporting the Google Sitemap protocol. In the official announcement on the Google Webmaster blog, it’s stated that Google, Yahoo, and MSN are going to collaborate on future changes and enhancements to the protocol.
This is great stuff. When the search engines join together to do these things, it makes life much simpler for webmasters. This is a great example of an area that does not represent “core search IP” where the major search engines should collaborate. Hopefully Ask will join this mix as well, because they do have a pretty good search engine as well.
So now that this is done, can we get the search engines to agree on implementing accurate “site:” and “link:” commands? This is another area that would be a huge help to webmasters. And I just don’t believe that this information would somehow reveal any search engine secret sauce. How ’bout it guys?