Sitemaps

www.mihswat.com
Rafiq Phillips
@rafiq
 What are Sitemaps?

Inform Search Engines

Additional Metadata
 Inform Search Engines

Why would you want to inform Search Engines?

 Additional Metadata
<?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>2010-
02-04</lastmod>       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
 Additional Metadata
<loc>http://www.news24.com/</loc>

Must begin with http(s) and end with a trailing /

< 2048 characters
 Additional Metadata
<lastmod>2010-02-04</lastmod>

In YYYY-MM-DD format
 Additional Metadata
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
• always
• hourly
• daily
• weekly
• monthly
• yearly
• never
 Additional Metadata
<priority>0.8</priority>

0.0 to 1.0
 Don’t forget
Your Sitemap file must be UTF-8.
As with all XML files, any data values (including
URLs) must use entity escape codes for the
characters listed in the table below.
 Sitemap Index File
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sit
emap/0.9">    <sitemap>

<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.
gz</loc>       <lastmod>2010-02-
04T09:23:17+02:00</lastmod>    </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
 Letting Search Engines Know
Robots.txt “Sitemap:
http://www.news24.com/sitemapindex.xml”
Ping the search engines…
www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F
%2Fwww.news24.com%2Fsitemapindex.xml
(URL encode everything after the /ping?
sitemap=)
Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster
Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer
 More Sitemaps info

Visit http://sitemaps.org/faq.php