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What are the XML Sitemaps ?

The intention with the sitemap is to make three parties happy:

• The Search Engines; by saving time for their spiders when searching the Net and downloading pages.
  
  
• Server owners; when the spiders download only updated pages less bandwidth is used on the server, which means money saved.
  
  
• Web site owner and/or Web Master; who gets updated pages indexed faster.

The Web Master can influence the spiders by giving "priority" for each page as well as date and time when each page has last been updated.

"Priority" number, between 0.0 - 1.0, is website specific and have no meaning if compared with webpages on another site. It's intended to give an indication of the Web Master's feeling of the relative importance of each page on his/her site only, default value is 0.5.

Additionally you can also give the time when pages last up-dated. The time is given in GMT (UTC) plus / minus your time difference. Plus (+) is East and minus (-) is West. See Don Pedro's Time Zone Explanation.

There are two kinds of site maps, compressed or non-compressed (maximum size 10 MB). If your site have only about 50-100 pages and you update may be only 10-15 pages per month or less, the non-compressed version is enough. This you can easily handle manually in just a few minutes per month only. The compressed version is very difficult to read and change manually.

You get either a compressed or a non-compressed sitemap at:

• www.xml-sitemaps.com/,
  
• www.sitemaps.org/,
  
• www.google.com/webmasters/, or
  
• A third party Generator

Copy the code and paste it into Notepad, save in your root directory, i.e. "www.example.com/sitemap.xml" :

• Save as: sitemap.xml
  
• File type: All files
  
• Encoding: UTF-8

Get full description from Sitemaps Org.. The beginning of the sitemap looks like this:

<?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>
</urlset>

If you want to validate the sitemap, you add temporarily a couple of lines of code at the beginning between the first line and "urlset", see the "protocol" for advice. When you want to validate the xml sitemap, go to list of validators at xml.com.

If you don't find a validator you like and you cannot find the error Google Webmasters tells you they have found - generate a new one and upload that one. Because these are automated programs there can be for humans "invisible" errors. Before you upload a new xml sitemap, check your current "faulty" one is in UTF-8 format.

Get Google's Guide to XML sitemaps.

Sitemaps - Multiple Content

In December 2007 Google added a video specific sitemap. It follows the standard xml sitemap protocol but the format is slightly different.

Beginning of April 2010 Google added a possibility to include your important images in your regular XML sitemap.

Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats the system got more complicated. Google has end of June 2010 introduced a format for mixed content to make it easier to include multiple content types in the same file.

Below is an example of a standard xml sitemap for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
    </image:image>
    <video:video>
    <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc>
      <video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title>
    </video:video>
  </url>
</urlset>

On Aug. 15, 2010, Google added some more information about tags to be included with video data.

Google

Once you have uploaded the sitemap on your server, initially you add your xml sitemap to Google's Webmaster's Tools, i.e. Webmaster's "console". Follow instructions on Google's pages.

Once Google Bot has picked up the sitemap their spider will continue visiting and checking on up-dates. The more incoming links you have, the more often the spider will visit.

Full Description of Google's XML sitemap. See also Google's Sitemaps FAQ.

End of December 2008 Google informed the sitemaps can be submitted without specifying file type. See list of kinds of sitemap files Google supports.

Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo

As of end of July 2007 MSN - Live Search started to read xml sitemaps. End of November 2007 MSN-Live Search opened Live Search Webmaster Tools ( Beta ). In the same blog it's said they will also honour autodiscovery, see below. The Webmaster Tools, which were to give you reports on crawling and indexing problems, submit sitemaps, and view statistics. And of course, Sign Up for the service.

In June 2009 MSN scrapped Live Search and introduced their NEW search engine BING. I have tried it a few times, and yes it's a new search engine, it's not just new make-up on an old one. It gives different results ( better ) than Live Search before. In this connection the xml sitemap submit page URL changed. The new URL is:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/posts/archive/2009/10/09/submit-a-sitemap-to-bing.aspx
First change "YourWebAddress.com" to your own domain. ONLY AFTER THAT you hit enter. At least theoretically Bing has then received your XML sitemap.

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With Ask.com you can use the "ping" at this URL :

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Starting April 2007 Ask.com supports sitemaps in the robots.txt file. Beginning of December 2009 it was still OK with Ask and everything worked just fine.