In general, this is a list of URLs for your website in a form of XML file (it also known as Google Sitemap because it was introduced first by Google). Besides that it allows you to include additional SEO-specific information about each URL such as the date it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is. XML format ensures that this information can be easily processed on different kinds of computers, applications and systems, so Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Baidu, AOL, Yandex etc) won't have any problems with understanding your sitemap files.
XML Sitemap sample:
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" >
< url >
< loc >http://www.example.com/< /loc >
< lastmod >2005-01-01< /lastmod >
< changefreq >monthly< /changefreq >
< priority >0.8< /priority >
< /url >
< url >
< loc >http://www.example.com/about.htm< /loc >
< changefreq >daily< /changefreq >
< /url >
< /urlset >
The sitemap example above contains 2 URLs and all of the allowed optional tags: < lastmod>, < changefreq> and < priority >.
There are a couple of limitations imposed by Google: a single XML sitemap file can contain not more then 50,000 URLs and may not be larger than 10 Megabytes.
Why do you need a Sitemap
...because it allows to inform Search Engines about important pages on your website. That increases its visibility to Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex etc, and ensures indexing of the web pages that might not be discovered otherwise. Those provide additional information about your site to searching engines, complementing their traditional methods of crawling the World Wide Web. All major search engines use the same XML-based protocol for that. This means that having an XML Sitemap will let Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing (MSN), and Ask have up-to-date information any time you upload a new map file to your server.
XML Sitemaps are especially helpful if:
You have a brand new website
Your web-site has dynamic content generated by CMS (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, DotNetNuke, etc)
Your have got a lot of pages
You don't have desired Google PageRank
Your website has complex navigation
Some of your webpages are either not accessible from the main page and its children, or are burried too deep in the page hierarchy
If you happen to have broken links on your website, our Sitemap Generator will detect those and inform you of all the dead links and the pages these links are on!
XML Sitemap sample:
< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" >
< url >
< loc >http://www.example.com/< /loc >
< lastmod >2005-01-01< /lastmod >
< changefreq >monthly< /changefreq >
< priority >0.8< /priority >
< /url >
< url >
< loc >http://www.example.com/about.htm< /loc >
< changefreq >daily< /changefreq >
< /url >
< /urlset >
The sitemap example above contains 2 URLs and all of the allowed optional tags: < lastmod>, < changefreq> and < priority >.
There are a couple of limitations imposed by Google: a single XML sitemap file can contain not more then 50,000 URLs and may not be larger than 10 Megabytes.
Why do you need a Sitemap
...because it allows to inform Search Engines about important pages on your website. That increases its visibility to Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex etc, and ensures indexing of the web pages that might not be discovered otherwise. Those provide additional information about your site to searching engines, complementing their traditional methods of crawling the World Wide Web. All major search engines use the same XML-based protocol for that. This means that having an XML Sitemap will let Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Bing (MSN), and Ask have up-to-date information any time you upload a new map file to your server.
XML Sitemaps are especially helpful if:
You have a brand new website
Your web-site has dynamic content generated by CMS (Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, DotNetNuke, etc)
Your have got a lot of pages
You don't have desired Google PageRank
Your website has complex navigation
Some of your webpages are either not accessible from the main page and its children, or are burried too deep in the page hierarchy
If you happen to have broken links on your website, our Sitemap Generator will detect those and inform you of all the dead links and the pages these links are on!