Summary: Providing XML sitemaps helps Google and the other search engines to find all of the pages on your website. You can also easily track which have been indexed through Google webmaster tools.
XML sitemaps help search engines find all of your pages. XML sitemaps are not, however, an SEO tool as some still people believe. Having an XML sitemap won’t affect your rankings (except to the extent that if the search engines can’t find your pages any other way, you’ll potentially get more traffic as a result of giving the search engines this info). Putting information in the sitemap such as that your site gets updated every day, won’t cause Google to start spidering your site daily.
Here is an example of an XML sitemap:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&desc=vacation_hawaii</loc> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url> </urlset>
You should avoid putting more than 500 URLs in each sitemap. If you have a number of sitemaps, you create an XML sitemap of those sitemaps (!) like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <sitemap> <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc> <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod> </sitemap> <sitemap> <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc> <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod> </sitemap> </sitemapindex>
Sitemaps.org provides full details of the XML format: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php#sitemapXMLExample
You can create a sitemap of up to 500 pages using XML Sitemaps: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/(free)
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1 Response to “XML sitemaps – why and how”
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said at 10:04 am on July 22nd, 2010
Great article thanks for that!!