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A free tool from British-based Microsoft MVP Marc Liron helps webmasters bash out video sitemaps suitable for Google's indexing.

Liron thinks he has beaten everyone to the punch when it comes to creating video sitemaps. His Google Video Sitemap Generator for Windows and Mac platforms takes webmasters through a three step process to build one for posted videos.

In an email, Liron said he quickly got fed up hand-coding the XML for video sitemaps after Google announced their support for the new protocol. That led to him crafting the Generator, currently in version 1.0 with new tweaks promised soon.

Google announced video sitemap support shortly before Christmas. Their extension of the Sitemap protocol lets webmasters submit all video files and relevant metadata to Google in one file.

The base Sitemap protocol enables webmasters to enhance the quality of the indexing search engines that follow the protocol can perform. Unlike the base protocol, only Google supports the video extension presently.

Sitemaps should appeal to the early adopters among those webmasters who publish videos. If Google is having an easier time finding videos when the new Sitemap protocol is in use, no one will want to lag behind the competition in adopting it themselves.