How To Create Your Sitemap?

How To Create Your Sitemap?

Submitting your Sitemap via the search engine's submission interface

To submit your Sitemap directly to a search engine, which will enable you to receive status information and any processing errors, refer to each search engine's documentation.

Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file

You can specify the location of the Sitemap using a robots.txt file. To do this, simply add the following line including the full URL to the sitemap:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn't matter where you place it in your file. If you have a Sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You don't need to list each individual Sitemap listed in the index file.

You can specify more than one Sitemap file per robots.txt file.

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host1.xml

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host2.xml

Submitting your Sitemap via an HTTP request

To 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_url

For 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.gz

URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:

<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gz

You 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.

Sample XML Sitemap Index

The following example shows a Sitemap index that lists two Sitemaps:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Sitemam> xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <Sitemap> 

      <Loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>

      <Lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>

   </sitemap>

   </Sitemap>

      <Loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>

      <Lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

   </Sitemap>

</Sitemapindex>