Re: msn supports google sitemap protocol

I noticed all my sitemap URLs are listed on MSN now as well. I didn't
even submit the sitemap, the MSNbot just happened to find it when
crawling the site a few days ago. It appears as though MSN is looking
for any file named sitemap* and checking the content to see if it is a
sitemap XML doc.

In the meantime, Google still won't read our sitemap. We keep getting
the vague "HTTP error" every time (18 out of 20 times now) googlebot
tries to pick up our sitemap. To make matters worse the normal
googlebot spider of the site is only indexing the home page even though
the site has hundreds of static links with paths on the home page.

Thanks to MSN being able to process the sitemap, and Google refusing to
even pick it up in the first place - all of our listings are now coming
up on MSN but only the home page is showing on Google. In fact, MSN
now is ranking our site at the top of the fold for specific keywords
that we are interested in.

I hate to say it, but if traffic keeps building the way it is, MSN
could soon become our favorite search engine. ;)

ref files (MSN sees these, Google does not):
http://www.southernapartments.com/sitemap.gz
http://www.modellocate.com/sitemap.gz