Yahoo!, along with Microsoft and Google, is starting a service of ‘cross-host submission’ for Sitemaps that will make it simpler and easier for webmasters in managing their respective Sitemap submissions to the top search engines. With this development, it will now be possible for webmasters to submit Sitemaps, corresponding to differently-hosted sites even while using a single mechanism.

A Sitemap file comprises the URLs for the web pages on a given site along with meta-data like last crawled date, priority apart from the content’s change frequency. To make sure validity of the metadata, Sitemaps previously would need to be on the same path and host as the URLs they comprise. As a result, the Sitemaps files and the actual site content needed to be hosted on the same servers.
With the new ‘cross-host submission’ for Sitemaps, it will be possible to host it on a different path and host than the URLs it comprises. Say, if you’ve a sitemap-www.xml for the relevant URLs on http://www.example.com, but want to put the former on http://sitemaps.example.com, it is now possible. Collaboration of Yahoo! with Microsoft and Google started in November 2006 when they first made public a joint support for ‘Sitemaps protocol’. Since then, they have continued to address the needs of their webmasters through new protocols and standards.