WebProNews

One sitemap may now support multiple sites on different hosts thanks to a new addition to the Sitemaps protocol.

One sitemap to rule them all? After today, the question will be "why not?"

The Yahoo Search blog announced an update to sitemaps during the SMX West event. Along with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo disclosed a new feature for cross-host support for sitemaps.

"To ensure validity of this metadata, Sitemaps have previously been required to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contain," Yahoo Search noted. "This requirement forced the Sitemaps files to be hosted on the same servers as the actual site content."

With the change, the sitemap may be hosted on a different host, with the ability to support multiple sites on separate hosts. Webmasters will need to add a line to their robots.txt file to direct crawlers to the differently-hosted sitemap.

The official Sitemaps FAQ has been updated to reflect the support for separately hosted sitemaps.

Yahoo Search cited a couple of concerns from webmasters that led to this latest update. Webmasters wanted to be able to keep user-facing content separate from feeds, as well as the ability to manage a number of websites from one sitemap.

"We hope this enhancement helps address those needs," the announcement said.