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Sitemap Google sitemap xml sitemap - Online xml sitemap creator

Google sitemap
 
sitemap Google sitemap , xml sitemap creator

What is sitemap?

 

What is Google sitemap or XML sitemap?

XML sitemapsor Google Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site based on the instruction given in the xml file.
 

What is a sitemap.xml file?

A sitemap.xml file is a file that lists every link or URL that is in your site.  This is like food for the search engines, and allows us to inform search engines about URLs on your website that are available to index.
 

Sitemap protocals / Google sitemap formats or xml sitemap formats.

The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

The Sitemap must have the following:

  1. The head of the document
    This is an XML document, so you need to start it with an XML declaration:
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

  2. Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
    Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.

  3. Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.

  4. Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.
    All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines
XML tag definitions:
XML TAGS Required? Description
<urlset></urlset> Required Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.
<url></url> Required

Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.

<loc></loc> Required

URL of the page,this URL must begin with the protocol such as http:// and must be less than 2,048 characters.

<lastmod></lastmod> Optional On which date the file was modified , and the date format should be YYYY-MM-DD
<changefreq>
</changefreq>
Optional This field is a suggestion rather than a command to search engines. They may crawl the pages more frequently than you indicate or less. Don't rely on the option "never" to tell the search engine never to spider it. Use your robots.txt file for that. Valid values for this field are:
always,never,daily,weekly,monthly,yearly
<priority></priority> Optional

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers and the default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.


Entity escaping

Sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.

  • Ampersand - & - &amp;
  • Single Quote - ' - &apos;
  • Double Quote - " - &quot;
  • Greater Than - > - &gt;
  • Less Than -< - &lt;

A sample sitemap in xml format

  The following example shows a Sitemap in XML format.
  <?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&amp;desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&amp;desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&amp;desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>0.3</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&amp;desc=vacation_usa</loc>
<lastmod>2004-11-23</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
   

Where I need to save the sitemap.xml file?

Sitemaps.org recommends that you place all your sitemaps in the root of your Web server, so that the files are most inclusive. A sitemap placed in subfolder like http://www.example.com/sitemap/
can only include files in the "sitemap/" directory and below.

How to submit sitemap to Google search engine?

  1. Create webmaster accont in http://www.google.com/webmaster/
  2. Verify your site ownership by adding metatag / google in your site
  3. Upload your Sitemap to your site.
  4. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
  5. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.
  6. In the text box, complete the path to your Sitemap (for example, if your Sitemap is at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml, type sitemap.xml).
  7. Click Submit Sitemap and normally google will download the xml file in a day time.

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