Competition among search engines is tough, but when it comes to standards, it helps to cooperate. In this case, the three major players have decided to team up in supporting a single site map protocol. Google has announced that Yahoo! and MSN are adopting the Google Sitemap XML protocol as standard.

We’re thrilled to tell you that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As part of this development, we’re moving the protocol to a new namespace, www.sitemaps.org, and raising the version number to 0.9. The sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the protocol and publish enhancements on the jointly-maintained site sitemaps.org

If you run a blog, though, you need not install a sitemap in most cases, since the intra-linking and trackbacking features of most blog software would usually be enough to help crawlers index your site.

By default, WordPress blogs are simple and easy for search engines to crawl, so you don’t need to have a Sitemap unless you notice only a few pages from your site are NOT being listed on Google and other search engines. Your site’s design and intrasite linking might not be solid enough for all your posts to be found when web crawlers come to call. A Sitemap will help overcome the problem of your lost post orphans, helping the crawler find its way around your site thoroughly. - Lorelle on WordPress

Still, if you’re into fine-tuning your blog for SEO, it would be a good idea to install sitemaps. WordPress, for one, has an easy-to-use plugin that automatically generates sitemaps each time you publish an entry.