It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it? This event (read on, you’ll see what I mean) proves me right: don’t optimize solely for Google, optimize for all the search engines.

So welcome to Sitemaps.org! This (let’s be honest) Google initiative is supported by all the major search engines. Yeah: Yahoo, MSN (read Microsoft), and Google. No more enemies, but united for a better web. They’ve all adhered to Google’s sitemap protocol and created this website to define the sitemaps standard.

What do you know about sitemaps? Are they a new SEO trend – a new SEO technique? Yes. Is this going to be abused? Sure, but how? It looks pretty strict. I cannot imagine any way just yet.

A sitemap is a highly scalable XML file (read here the protocol) that lists the URLs for your website. You could include some additional information, such as importance in relation with other URLs of the website, updates frequency and so on, to allow the search engine spiders better crawl your web pages. A standard was necessary to smooth the SEO efforts of the web owners. Now sharing information about a website with every search engine is really easy.

That’s the answer if you were wondering why the Giants’ reunion. As Vanessa Fox (Google) says, the search engines and (sure) the people behind them “are really hoping that this will help webmasters to have an open standard and make it much easier so that they don’t have to worry about one type of feed for one engine and another type of feed for another engine.”

Personally I doubt that this was the only reason. I think the search engines understand that the Internet is changing and that social bookmarking becomes stronger and stronger. I believe this is a marketing strategy, a very smart marketing strategy. But no matter what reasons are behind it, we cannot ignore the advantages. Having a sitemaps standard will make our SEO efforts easier. We’ll no longer need to worry about what type of sitemap to submit to Google, what type to Yahoo, and so on.

Let’s hope that this initiative will lead to better search results. In the meanwhile we can just applaud the Giants’ initiative that gives us an important lesson about the Web: the  more you do for the benefit of the community, the more popular you get.

And one more piece of advice: use sitemaps. This is not a Google trick, nor a mood and not even an experiment. With Yahoo and Microsoft adhering to this standard, I hope it is clear that this is a new SEO direction. And by the way, you still need to submit the sitemaps to each search engine, separately. Submitting to Google is not enough.