Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced on Wednesday that they are collaborating to allow webmasters to more easily ensure their sites are indexed by search engines.

The top three search engines will be using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web, writes TechChrunch, citing a post by Danny Sullivan. The system, based at Sitemaps.org, provides instructions for installing an XML file on servers, allowing the three search engines to track website updates.

Those who use Google Sitemaps need not make changes, because Yahoo and Microsoft will now read those sitemaps. The protocol is being offered via an Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License; that is, any search engine can use it for commercial purposes as well as derive variations of the tool.

The effort was initiated by Google and Yahoo, reports CNET. "We thought it would be great for publishers and webmasters to be able to submit their content in one format for all the different search engines," Tim Mayer, director of product management at Yahoo Search, is quoted as saying. "We are proposing the format together and inviting other search engines to adopt it."

Ken Moss, general manager of Windows Live Search at Microsoft, provided an optimistic view: "I am sure this will be the first of many industry initiatives you will see us working and collaborating on."

The manual web-page submission process via Sitemaps supplements the engines' web crawling and does not guarantee that pages will be included in a search engine's index.