Guide to Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps, utilises the Sitemaps Protocol standard to inform search engines as to the location of pages on websites.
Hitorically, robots from search engines come to the first page on a website, and then find their way via hyperlinks around the rest of the website - identifying on the way all the pages within the site. This process can often takes weeks or months.
Sitemaps are a very easy way of webmasters to let search engines know of the pages on a site.
Sitemap Structure
The sitemaps protocol is a very simple, XML format file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.google-sitemaps.co.uk</loc>
<lastmod>2007-05-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Sitemap Limits
Sitemap files do have upper limits on the number of links they can have. They cannot be more than 10 MB in size, and must not contain more than 50,000 URLs. If you need to go above this, then you need to create a sitemap index file. You can also compress your sitemap file (e.g. using gzip) to keep it within the 10MB limit.
Submitting Sitemaps
Google Webmaster Tools is an easy and free resource to allow you to submit your sitemap to Google.
Alternatively, with the April 2007 introduction of auto-discovery, you can add an entry to your robots.txt in the following format.
Sitemap: <sitemap_location>
where <sitemap_location> is a full URL such as http://www.google-sitemaps.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Useful Links
Sitemaps History
[April 2007] Yahoo, MSN, Google and Ask announce a new addition to sitemaps allowing auto discovery of the sitemap file(s).
[November 2006] Google, MSN and Yahoo announce support of the sitemaps protocol, with the new version being version 0.90.
[June 2005] Google introduce Google Sitemaps version 0.84.
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