Sitemaps #GoogleSEOGuide #s1ep21
General Information About Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file type where we provide information about pages, videos, and other files on your site and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl our site more efficiently.
With the sitemap, we notify Google of pages and files on our site that we consider important and also provide valuable information about these files. For example, when a page was last updated and alternative language versions of the page.
We may use the sitemap to provide information about certain types of content on our pages, such as videos, images, and news content. For example, you can see the following:
- A sitemap video entry can specify the video running time, rating, and age-appropriateness rating.
- A sitemap image entry can include the location of the images included in a page.
- A sitemap news entry can include the article title and publication date.
If you're using a CMS such as WordPress, Wix, or Blogger, it's likely that your CMS has already made a sitemap available to search engines and you don't have to do anything.
Do We Need A Sitemap?
If our site's pages are properly linked, Google can usually discover most of our site. Proper linking means that all pages that you deem important can be reached through some form of navigation, be that our site's menu or links that we placed on pages. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of larger or more complex sites or more specialized files.
A sitemap helps search engines discover URLs on your site, but it doesn't guarantee that all the items in your sitemap will be crawled and indexed. However, in most cases, your site will benefit from having a sitemap.
We will need a sitemap if:
? Our site is really large. As a result, it's more likely Google web crawlers might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.
? Our site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or not well linked to each other. If your site pages don't naturally reference each other, you can list them in a sitemap to ensure that Google doesn't overlook some of your pages.
? Our site is new and has few external links to it. Googlebot and other web crawlers crawl the web by following links from one page to another. As a result, Google might not discover your pages if no other sites link to them.
? Our site has a lot of rich media content (video, images) or is shown in Google News. If provided, Google can take additional information from sitemaps into account for search, where appropriate.
We may not need a sitemap in the following cases:
- Our site is "small". By small, Google means about 500 pages or fewer on our site. (Only pages that you think need to be in search results count toward this total.)
- Our site is comprehensively linked internally. This means that Google can find all the important pages on our site by following links starting from the homepage.
- You don't have many media files (video, image) or news pages that we want to show in search results. Sitemaps can help Google find and understand video and image files, or news articles, on our site. If you don't need these results to appear in image, video, or news results, we might not need a sitemap.
Build a sitemap
This part describes how to build a sitemap and make it available to Google.
- Decide which sitemap format you want to use.
- Create the sitemap, either automatically or manually.
- Make our sitemap available to Google by adding it to our robots.txt file or directly submitting it to Search Console.
Sitemap formats
Google supports several sitemap formats:
? XML
? RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0
? Text
Google expects the standard sitemap protocol in all formats. Google does not currently consume the <priority> attribute in sitemaps.
All formats limit a single sitemap to 50MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs. If you have a larger file or more URLs, you will have to break your list into multiple sitemaps.
You can optionally create a sitemap index file (a file that points to a list of sitemaps) and submit that single index file to Google. You can submit multiple sitemaps and/or sitemap index files to Google.
XML
Here is a very basic XML sitemap that includes the location of a single URL:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>https://www.example.com/foo.html</loc> <lastmod>2018-06-04</lastmod> </url> </urlset>
You can find more complex examples and full documentation at sitemaps.org.
RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0
If we have a blog with an RSS or Atom feed, we can submit the feed's URL as a sitemap. Most blog software is able to create a feed for you, but recognize that this feed only provides information on recent URLs.
? Google accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds.
? You can use an mRSS (media RSS) feed to provide Google details about video content on your site.
Text
If your sitemap includes only web page URLs, you can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:
https://www.example.com/ocak-fiyatlari.html https://www.example.com/subat-fiyatlari.html
Ultimate Google General Sitemap Guidelines Checklist:
Create a sitemap
When creating a sitemap, we're telling search engines about which URLs we prefer to show in search results. These are the canonical URLs. If we have the same content accessible under different URLs, choose the URL you prefer and include that in the sitemap instead of all URLs that lead to the same content.
Once we've decided which URLs to include in the sitemap, pick one of the following ways to create a sitemap, depending on our site architecture and size:
? Let your CMS generate a sitemap for you.
? For sitemaps with less than a few dozen URLs, you can manually create a sitemap.
? For sitemaps with more than a few dozen URLs, automatically generate a sitemap.
Let your CMS generate a sitemap for you
If we're using a CMS such as WordPress, Wix, or Blogger, it's likely that your CMS has already made a sitemap available to search engines. Try searching for information about how our CMS generates sitemaps, or how to create a sitemap if your CMS doesn't generate a sitemap automatically. For example, in the case of Wix, search for "Wix sitemap".
For all other site setups, you will need to generate the sitemap yourself.
Manually create a sitemap
For sitemaps with less than a few dozen URLs, you may be able to manually create a sitemap. For this, open a text editor such as Windows Notepad or Nano (Linux, MacOS), and follow a syntax described in the Sitemap Formats section. You can name the file anything you like as long as the characters are allowed in a URL.
You can manually create larger sitemaps, but it's a tedious process.
Automatically generate a sitemap
For sitemaps with more than a few dozen URLs, we will need to generate the sitemap. There are various tools that can generate a sitemap. However, the best way is to have our website software generate it for us.
For example, you can extract your site's URLs from your website's database and then export the URLs to either the screen or the actual file on your web server. Talk to your developers or server manager about this solution. If you need inspiration for the code, check out Google's old collection of third-party sitemap generators.
Keep in mind that sitemaps can't be larger than 50 MB.
Submit your sitemap to Google
Google doesn't check a sitemap every time a site is crawled; a sitemap is checked only the first time that they notice it, and thereafter only when we ping them to let them know that it's changed. Alert Google about a sitemap only when it's new or updated; don't submit or ping unchanged sitemaps multiple times.
If you have updated pages in the sitemap, mark them with the <lastmod> field. Other XML files have a similar field, such as <updated> for Atom XML. You can also learn how to compute this date.
There are a few different ways to make your sitemap available to Google:
? Submit a sitemap in Search Console using the Sitemaps report.
? Use the ping tool. Send a GET request in your browser or the command line to this address, specifying the full URL of the sitemap. Be sure that the sitemap file is accessible:
https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=FULL_URL_OF_SITEMAP
Example:
https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml
? Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap. Google will find it the next time we crawl your robots.txt file:
https://example.com/sitemap.xml
? Use WebSub if you use Atom/RSS for your sitemap and want to broadcast your changes to other search engines in addition to Google.
Submitting a sitemap is merely a hint: it doesn't guarantee that Google will download the sitemap or use the sitemap for crawling URLs on the site.
Split Up Large Sitemaps
If we have a sitemap that's larger than 50MB, we'll need to split up our large sitemap into multiple sitemaps. We can use a sitemap index file as a way to submit many sitemaps at once. The XML format of a sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a sitemap file. The sitemap index file uses the following XML tags:
? sitemapindex - the parent tag surrounds the file.
? sitemap - the parent tag for each sitemap listed in the file (a child of the sitemapindex tag)
? loc - the location of the sitemap (a child of the sitemap tag)
You can see the Sitemap Protocol page for more information on the syntax.
The following example shows a sitemap index in XML format that lists two sitemaps:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="https://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>https://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>https://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
Like sitemap files, sitemap index files must be 50MB (uncompressed) or less in size and can contain up to 50,000 sitemap URLs. Sitemap index files must be UTF-8 encoded, and URLs escaped appropriately.
Once you've made and saved your sitemap index file, you can submit your index file to Google.
? Make sure that you upload and save all the referenced sitemaps to the same site as your sitemap index file.
? Sitemaps that are referenced in the sitemap index file must be in the same directory as the sitemap index file or lower in the site hierarchy.
For example, if the sitemap index file is at https://example.com/public/sitemap_index.xml, it can only contain sitemaps that are in the same or deeper directory, like https://example.com/public/shared/...
You can submit up to 500 sitemap index files for each site in your Search Console account.
Manage sitemaps for multiple sites
If we have multiple websites, we can simplify the process of creating and submitting sitemaps by creating one or more sitemaps that include URLs for all your verified sites, and saving the sitemap(s) to a single location. All sites must be verified in Search Console. We can choose to use:
? A single sitemap that includes URLs for multiple websites, including sites from different domains. For example, the sitemap located at https://host1.example.com/sitemap.xml can include the following URLs.
- https://host1.example.com
- https://host2.example.com
- https://host3.example.com
- https://host1.example1.com
- https://host1.example.ch
? Individual sitemaps (one for each site) that all reside in a single location.
- https://host1.example.com/host1-example-sitemap.xml
- https://host1.example.com/host2-example-sitemap.xml
- https://host1.example.com/host3-example-sitemap.xml
- https://host1.example.com/host1-example1-sitemap.xml
- https://host1.example.com/host1-example-ch-sitemap.xml
Cross-site submissions work only if all sites have been verified in Search Console, or the sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt files of their individual hosts.
To host cross-site sitemaps in a single location, we can either verify all sites in Search Console to prove ownership of each site that is referenced in the sitemaps or specify individual sitemaps in each site's robots.txt file:
To submit sitemaps through Search Console:
- Make sure that you have verified ownership of all the sites.
- Create a sitemap that includes URLs from all the sites that you want to cover. You can create a single sitemap that includes URLs from all sites or you can create one or more separate sitemaps for each site.
- Using Google Search Console, submit your sitemap(s).
To specify sitemaps in each site's robots.txt file:
- Create sitemaps that include URLs from a single site.
- Upload all sitemaps to a single site you have control over, for example, https://sitemaps.example.com.
- Reference the sitemap of each individual site from the respective robots.txt files. For example, if you created a sitemap for https://example.com/ and you're hosting the sitemap at https://sitemaps.example.com/sitemap-example-com.xml, reference the sitemap in the robots.txt file at https://example.com/robots.txt with sitemap: https://sitemaps.example.com/sitemap-example-com.xml.
To be continued...
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