Sitemaps was the last big thing they united on. It's been very helpful to have. Years before that, they agreed on meta description tags and robots.txt blocking.

Sitemaps was the last big thing they united on. It's been very helpful to have. Years before that, they agreed on meta description tags and robots.txt blocking. The latter helped keep many web sites from being overwhelmed by requests, yet enabled search engines to grow. I think it's a good thing.