As reported by TechCrunch, Google, Yahoo and MSN have all agreed to use the same sitemap to index your website.

A sitemap is a valuable tool that you can use to tell a search engine where all the pages are on your website. It is sometimes in plain text and sometimes it uses XML. For example, the SpryDev Google sitemap is here:

http://www.sprydev.com/?q=gsitemap

Now, Yahoo and MSN have agreed to accept the Google standard. Actually, it goes beyond that. They've all agreed to make the Google sitemap the "standard" sitemap and released it using a Creative Commons License so it can be used by any search engine. You can read more about sitemaps at SiteMaps.org,

What does this mean for our customers? Actually...nothing. :-) We already use the Google sitemap for all of our customers and that will not change. Now, we will submit that same sitemap to Yahoo and MSN and you'll be fully indexed in their engines, too. We were already submitting to Yahoo and MSN but now we can do it all with one sitemap instead of three. That saves time and means we can quickly get it done and move on to more important things like link building.

Bottom line: This is a great move and should simplify site submissions.