XML Sitemaps 101
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The document discusses sitemaps, which are files that provide metadata about a website to search engines to help them better index the site. Sitemaps inform search engines about URLs on a site and additional information like modification dates and priority. They use XML format and common elements include loc, lastmod, changefreq, and priority. The document also covers sitemap index files for large sites and ways to notify search engines about sitemaps through robots.txt files and pinging search engine sites directly.
XML Sitemaps 101
- 2. What are Sitemaps?Inform Search EnginesAdditional Metadata
- 3. Inform Search EnginesWhy would you want to inform Search Engines?
- 4. Additional Metadata<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlsetxmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> ???<url> ??????<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> ??????<lastmod>2010-02-04</lastmod> ??????<changefreq>monthly</changefreq> ??????<priority>0.8</priority></url></urlset>
- 5. Additional Metadata<loc>http://www.news24.com/</loc>Must begin with http(s) and end with a trailing /< 2048 characters
- 6. Additional Metadata<lastmod>2010-02-04</lastmod> In YYYY-MM-DD format
- 7. Additional Metadata<changefreq>always</changefreq> alwayshourlydailyweeklymonthlyyearlynever
- 9. Don¡¯t forgetYour Sitemap file must be UTF-8. As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.
- 10. Sitemap Index File<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <sitemapindexxmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> ???<sitemap><loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc> ??????<lastmod>2010-02-04T09:23:17+02:00</lastmod> ???</sitemap> </sitemapindex>
- 11. Letting Search Engines KnowRobots.txt ¡°Sitemap: http://www.news24.com/sitemapindex.xml¡±Ping the search engines¡www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.news24.com%2Fsitemapindex.xml(URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=)Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer
- 12. More Sitemaps infoVisit http://sitemaps.org/faq.php