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Where do I place my Sitemap?
Your sitemap must be renamed to sitemap.xml and uploaded to your root directory of your web site.
How big can my Sitemap be?
Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs.
What do I do after I create my Sitemap?
Once you have created the Sitemap and placed it on your webserver, you should create
a file called robots.txt to tell search engines where your site map is located.
If this file already exists on your website just add the line "Sitemap: " as shown below.
You can submit your new sitemap directly
to search engines that support the Sitemaps protocol, or use the
Free Search Engine Submission Tool at HugeToolBox.com.
You can also create an account and log into
www.google.com/webmasters and submit your sitemap there.
Does it matter which character encoding method I use
to generate my Sitemap files?
Yes. Your Sitemap files must use UTF-8 encoding.
How do I specify time?
Use W3C Datetime encoding for the lastmod timestamps and all other dates
and times in this protocol. For example, 2004-09-22T14:12:14+00:00.
This encoding allows you to omit the time portion of the ISO8601 format;
for example, 2004-09-22 is also valid. However, if your site changes
frequently, you are encouraged to include the time portion so crawlers
have more complete information about your site.
How do I compute lastmod date?
For static files, this is the actual file update date. You can use the
UNIX date command to get this date:
$ date --iso-8601=seconds -u -r /home/foo/www/bar.html
>> 2004-10-26T08:56:39+00:00
For many dynamic URLs, you may be able to easily compute a lastmod date
based on when the underlying data was changed or by using some
approximation based on periodic updates (if applicable). Using even an
approximate date or timestamp can help crawlers avoid crawling URLs that
have not changed. This will reduce the bandwidth and CPU requirements
for your web servers.
Where do I place my Sitemap?
It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root
directory of your HTML server; that is, place it at http://example.com/sitemap.xml.
In some situations, you may want to produce different Sitemaps for
different paths on your site — e.g., if security permissions in your
organization compartmentalize write access to different directories.
We assume that if you have the permission to upload http://example.com/path/sitemap.xml,
you also have permission to report metadata under http://example.com/path/.
All URLs listed in the Sitemap must reside on the same host as the
Sitemap. For instance, if the Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml,
it can't include URLs from http://subdomain.example.com. If the Sitemap
is located at http://www.example.com/myfolder/sitemap.xml, it can't
include URLs from http://www.example.com.
How big can my Sitemap be?
Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can
contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. These limits help to ensure that your
web server does not get bogged down serving very large files. This means
that if your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or your Sitemap is
bigger than 10MB, you must create multiple Sitemap files and use a
Sitemap index file. You should use a Sitemap index file even if you have
a small site but plan on growing beyond 50,000 URLs or a file size of
10MB. A Sitemap index file can include up to 1,000 Sitemaps and must not
exceed 10MB (10,485,760 bytes). You can also use gzip to compress your
Sitemaps.
My site has tens of millions of URLs; can I somehow submit only those
that have changed recently?
You can list the URLs that change frequently in a small number of
Sitemaps and then use the lastmod tag in your Sitemap index file to
identify those Sitemap files. Search engines can then incrementally
crawl only the changed Sitemaps.
What do I do after I create my Sitemap?
Once you have created the Sitemap file and placed it on your webserver,
you submit it to search engines that support the Sitemaps protocol. The
search engines can then retrieve your Sitemap and make the URLs
available to their crawlers. Refer to each search engine's documentation
for more information about submitting to them. You can also submit your
Sitemap using an HTTP request (replace <searchengine_URL> with the URL
provided by the search engine):
Issue your request to the following URL:
<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_urlFor example, if your Sitemap
is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz, your URL will become:
<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.gzURL
encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:
<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gzYou
can issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of
your choosing. A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response
code; if you receive a different response, you should resubmit your
request. The HTTP 200 response code only indicates that the search
engine has received your Sitemap, not that the Sitemap itself or the
URLs contained in it were valid. An easy way to do this is to set up an
automated job to generate and submit Sitemaps on a regular basis.
Note: If you are providing a Sitemap index file, you only need to issue
one HTTP request that includes the location of the Sitemap index file;
you do not need to issue individual requests for each Sitemap listed in
the index.
Do URLs in the Sitemap need to be completely specified?
Yes. You need to include the protocol (for instance, http) in your URL.
You also need to include a trailing slash in your URL if your web server
requires one. For example, http://www.example.com/ is a valid URL for a
Sitemap, whereas www.example.com is not.
My site has both "http" and "https" versions of URLs. Do I need to
list both?
No. Please list only one version of a URL in your Sitemaps. Including
multiple versions of URLs may result in incomplete crawling of your
site.
URLs on my site have session IDs in them. Do I need to remove them?
Yes. Including session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and
redundant crawling of your site.
Does position of a URL in a Sitemap influence its use?
No. The position of a URL in the Sitemap is not likely to impact how it
is used or regarded by search engines.
Some of the pages on my site use frames. Should I include the
frameset URLs or the URLs of the frame contents?
Please include both URLs.
Can I zip my Sitemaps or do they have to be gzipped?
Please use gzip to compress your Sitemaps. Remember, your Sitemap must
be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes), whether compressed or not.
Will the "priority" hint in the XML Sitemap change the ranking of my
pages in search results?
The "priority" hint in your Sitemap only indicates the importance of a
particular URL relative to other URLs on your own site and does not
imply any effect on the ranking of your pages in search results.
What if I have another question about using the protocol or
submitting a Sitemap?
See the documentation available from each search engine for more details
about submission and usage of Sitemaps.
Where can I get additional help with SiteMaps?
See the Google Webmaster Page for additional details on setting up a sitemap for your website.
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