The International Rugby Board world rankings will for the first time be used to seed teams at the 2011 World Cup in New Zealand.

The rankings system, which has been in place since 2003, will be used for the pool allocation draw, which will be conducted in December, to seed the 12 automatic qualifiers from last year's showpiece event in France.

The new system replaces the previous seeding process, which was determined by team's performances at past World Cups.

The cut-off date, at which point the rankings will be used, will be December 1st this year and Rugby World Cup Ltd (RWCL) chairman Syd Millar said he hoped the move would help create closer matches in the initial stages of the World Cup when blow-out scores have been commonplace.

At present, there would be no northern hemisphere side among the top seeds with South Africa, New Zealand, Argentina and Australia occupying the top four spots in the rankings. Ireland, currently seventh, would be in the pool of seconds seeds while Scotland (10th) need to climb two places between now and December to avoid being in the pool of third seeds.

"In an innovative move, the IRB world rankings will be used to seed the 12 automatic qualifiers from RWC 2007 in France into a draw for the four pools for RWC 2011," he said.

"The rankings are now very well established and provide us with a credible and succinct way of seeding teams for the rugby World Cup pool draw.

"The RWCL board felt that the rankings are a more accurate record of a team's position at any given time and will provide the best possible chance of evenly-matched pools emerging from the draw."

Millar conceded it was not his preference to conduct the seeded draw almost three years ahead of the competition, however he indicated the logistics of holding the event in New Zealand had forced RWCL to confirm the December date.

"Ideally we would have liked to have the draw in 2009 but this would not allow enough time to negotiate and confirm venues for the 48 matches and the associated team base camps," he said.

"The organising committee Rugby New Zealand (RNZ) 2011 also needs sufficient time following the pool draw to develop the match schedule in association with RWC broadcasters, and there are other important time-dependent tournament planning considerations such as the ticketing programme."

RWCL also confirmed the World Cup would follow the same structure as the previous two competitions with four pools of five teams, with each team attempting to qualify for the knock-out phase from the quarter-finals onwards.