The SITEMAP.XML File

The SITEMAP.XML File

The SITEMAP.XML file is a document in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format where all the URLs of our Website are listed.

In addition to the URLs other information about each page is listed, such as its last update, its update frequency and the degree of importance of its content.

WHAT IS IT FOR?

With the SITEMAP.XML file we can:

–Indicate the existence of pages in a Website and ease their indexing by specifying their URLs.

– List pages that are not linked directly from other parts of your site (e.g.: product pages that are only shown after submitting a search form) but we wish to be indexed.

– Indicate the last update and the update frequency of each page. If you help make crawling a more efficient task we help search engines do their work, and they will thank you back with a better ranking.

– Establish the degree of importance of the content of each page. This way, if Google generates site links in the results page, we can indicate which pages to show according to their degree of importance in the Sitemap.

HOW TO CREATE A SITEMAP.XML FILE

We recommend you use this free Online tool to create your SITEMAP.XML file, although we also advice you to review it manually to make sure the degree of importance of the main pages is correct.

There are certain WordPress plugins like this one that generate Sitemaps, but you can also send the RSS Feed of your WordPress Website or Blog as a Sitemap, although only the last 10 articles will appear.

If you know how to code you can create a script that extracts all the pages URLs from your database in order to output them in XML format. One of the MetricSpot sitemaps is created this way.

The SITEMAP.XML files can only be up to 10Mb in size and contain a list of up to 50.000 URLs by file. You can create all the Sitemaps you need, but remember to submit them to search engines so they know where to find them.

The Sitemap is normally located in the root folder of your Website, the same as the FAVICON and ROBOTS. However, you can also place it elsewhere and indicate its location in the ROBOTS.TXT or directly submitting it to search engines through their Webmasters Tools.

SUBMITTING A SITEMAP TO SEARCH ENGINES

You can do this the following ways:

– Ping the search engine via HTTP. Write this URL address in your browser: “http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.your-website.com/sitemap.xml”

– Indicate it in the robots.txt file. Add this line to the file: “Sitemap: http://www.your-website.com/sitemap.xml”

– Using the Webmasters Tools provided by search engines, such as Google’s Webmaster Tools or Bing’s Tools. We recommend this last option.