Sitemaps

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

Sitemaps are an incredibly useful tool for website owners, they are an XML document that spiders can look at to more efficiently crawl through a website in a more intelligent manner. They also allow for added information about the pages including when they were last updated, how often the page gets changed and how important it is compared to other URLs.

Sitemaps are complementary to Robots.txt while one excludes a search engine from certain areas of your site, the other includes areas. You can include your site map in your Robots.txt by adding the following code to it.

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/mysitemap.xml/

Before creating your own site map you may want to find out whether the software package you are using is capable of doing so for you automatically, this can save you some effort!

For WordPress there are available SiteMap plugins, however supposedly there will be an integrated sitemap in Wordpress 2.7

There are also online Sitemap generators including this one here.

Once you have created your sitemap you must submit it to search engines, each one has their own way of doing it.

Google via Webmaster Tools, Yahoo via Site Explorer, and Ask! via copying the below into your browser and amending the URL as required.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

Sitemaps have a maximum limit of 50,000 URLs (but you should probably not go this high!) and or 10MB in size.

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