Make and Submit Sitemap to Google
Sitemap.xml made out by Google, which is the sitemap is written in xml format, so it must be written in accordance with the standards of Google. Currently, Google, Yahoo, MSN have already declared support for this format. This is a good way to provide information to major search engines about your site.
Sitemap is a list of pages on your site; googlebot will follow the list one by one to crawl your page. So it is efficient to tell search engine spiders where to find and claw your web page than let it search for.
Google has a complete detailed description of sitemap.xml:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8476
However, many webmasters still do not understand how to work with that. The following is the tutorials on how to make google xml sitemap manually.
XML Sitemap code examples
The complete format should be like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" >
These two lines are similar to the HTML head section and put it as the beginning of the
line and write your content next and close with </urlset>. You must
follow it without modification when creating sitemap. It should not with one character
wrong in writing, even if more than one space and it will shows error when Google claw
your site.
<url>: This is start tag of each web address and must be close with </url>
<loc>here is the full path url and must be start with http:// or
https:// </oc> the URL you put here is which you hope Googlebot to
claw.
Note: For some special character such as "&" should be change to escape character. "&" always appear in dynamic website.
Example:
After change to escape character
(this is example, it should not have "+" within url)
If you don’t change it or Googlebot only saw like this when clawing:
http://www.domainnames.com/search.asp?id=12345
That's why many people said only main url will be index by google when using dynamic website.
<lastmod>Page last modified</lastmod>
This is very important. Googlebot will compare with the last record it visits, and
it will pass this link if the record is same. That's mean it wouldn't come to update
your site content. So, you should change the date after you modified your site.
Googlebot will revisit and analysis your site for new index. Here must be the time
specified in ISO 8601 format description, format time format as
follows:
TZD is the local time zone designation mark, as US and Canada is -05:00
Note: Other format may cause error, such problems will be 2008-08-08 written 2008-8-8
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
It should be : "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly"，this tell search engines how often you change your site content.
<priority>1.0</priority>
Set at 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0
Note: Suggested to give different values to according to the importance of various type of web page. Don’t give 1.0 to all pages or it will show error to Google webmaster tools.
Submit sitemap to Google:
After finish your website sitemap, upload to your web server, and submit it to Search engines. Normally the system will download your file within few hours.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Sitemap.xml checksum
After submit your sitemap, you can check your sitemap details with Google webmaster tools. From there you can see how many URL is included and how many site was indexed by Google, even you will see any error occurs when search robots visit your site such as 404 or 500 page.
If xml sitemap you submitted is correct and without any error, other thing you need to do is waiting search engines to claw and index your web page. Website sitemap told the frequency of your site updates and search spiders will be come constantly, and your web page will be index more quickly.
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