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Update for Sitemaps

Google, Yahoo! and MSN have joined forces to support a new industry standard for sitemaps: Sitemaps 0.90. The official site for the joint venture is at http://www.sitemaps.org/.

Submit a Sitemap to MSN

Microsoft's formal interface for Sitemap submission can be found at Live Search Webmaster Tools and includes the ability to add crawl issue feedback, backlink data and export data in CSV format to Excel for offline analysis.

See http://webmaster.live.com.

Submit a Sitemap to Google

Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

See Google Sitemaps (BETA) Help for more information.

Submit a Sitemap to Yahoo

Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated sevice for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your ownsership of the site. First go to:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a verfication key html file - which you will need to upload to the root directory of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Why Use Sitemaps?

The XML Sitemap format allows you to provide a list of URLs and include additional information about those URLs in your Sitemap. This additional information includes the date the content at that URL last changed, how often that content can be expected to change and how important that URL is relative to other URLs on your site.

Each XML Sitemap file will have the following information:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

<url> ... </url>
<url> ... </url>
<url> ... </url>
</urlset>

[location, priority, last modified and frequency of change information is assigned to each page of your site.]

<url>
<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<lastmod>2005-07-03T16:18:09+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>

Location <loc> - the URL of your site and internal pages - http://www.yoursite.com/.

Priority <priority> - you can set the priority of each page relative to other pages on your site: 0.0 being the least, 0.5 is the default and 1.0 being pages with the greatest importance. This is only relative to your site and will not affect your rankings.

Last modified <lastmod> - the date and time when the page was last modified.

Change frequency <changefreq> - how frequently the content at the URL is likely to change: Never, weekly, daily, hourly, and so on - if you frequently update your pages this could be extremely important.

There are various options available which will allow you to generate an XML Sitemap:

XML Generator:

In order for the XML sitemap file on your site to be constantly updated, you need a Generator that will spider your site, list all the URLs and automatically feed them to Google. Keep in mind, Google also gives you the option of submitting a simple text file with all your URLs.

Google's Python Generator can be downloaded and set up on your server. It will produce your sitemap XML file and automatically submit it to Google. In order for this Generator to work, Python version 2.2 must be installed on your web server. This requires some knowledge of Python scripts.

PHP Code Generator:

You can also use a PHP Generator that you can place on your server. This generator will spider your site, and produce a XML sitemap file. Download the phpSitemapNG and upload it your server. Run the generator to get your XML sitemap file and send it to Google.

Online Generator:

Google keeps a list of Online Generator Third Party Suppliers on their site.

One of the easiest to use is XML Sitemaps - Create your Google Sitemap Online (which we highly recommend - it will even show you where there are broken links on your site for a small fee). You can index up to 500 pages very quickly and it will give you the sitemap XML file Google needs to index your site. You can download this file and make minor changes to priority, changing frequency, etc. Next upload the file as sitemap.xml to the root directory of your server. Then submit your Sitemap to Google.

Alternatively check out SiteMapspal which is also an excellent tool.

Next time you add pages to your site either re-run the program or manually update the sitemap.xml file.

Sitemap Validator:

Validate your Sitemap for accuracy.