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Building a Google Sitemap

What Are Google Sitemaps?

The web has grow incredibly fast there are over 2 trillion pages online which presents a huge problem for search engines. The problem was how to find all of the pages, how to index all of those pages found, and then how to know quickly about new pages as they became live. To address these problems Google in 2005 launched the Sitemap 0.84 Protocol. Google Sitemaps are XML files that list all of the pages on a website for a search engine robot which available for indexing. Sitemaps make the role of the search engines easier because all of site's content, which requires indexing, could be listed on one page. The XML file summarizes how frequently a particular website is updated, and records the last time any changes were made. Google allows each sitemap file to contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If your website includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple sitemap files and submit each one separately to Google. I’ll explain how to submit your sitemap later in this article.

Why are Google Sitemaps useful?

As I wrote earlier, sitemaps help the search engines to easily index sites and to know when those sites have been updated. Instead of having to go through all of your pages to find any new updates with could take multiple indexings of your site the search engines can visit your sitemaps and know instantly which pages were updated or added to your site. This helps not only the search engines but helps you because your new content can be indexed quicker and therefore be ranked sooner on the search engines. The point is sitemaps are a win win.

How do I Make a Google Sitemap?

There are a few formats you can use to create your Google sitemap including txt or xml files. You can give Google a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For instance:

http://www.allanpollett.com/file1.html
http://www.allanpollett.com/file2.html

However, this can be time consuming so I recommend using a site called Xml-sitemaps.com (I like it because does a good job and it’s free) Standalone Sitemap Generator
Their free version allows you to set the crawl frequency, set last update date, and set indexing priority. Recommend you set frequency to "daily" if you have a blog style site like mine and set last modification to "use server's response". Their free version will only build sitemaps for sites with up to 500 pages. You have a larger site you’ll have to use their paid version Unlimited Sitemap Generator. It costs $19.99 which is worth it. One of my clients paid another company to set up his sitemaps and was charged $1000, ouch. 

How do I get Google to see my sitemap?

Sitemaps can be submitted via Google Webmaster Tools or by using your robots.txt file.
Make sure you have your site added and verified in your Webmaster Tools account:

  1. Upload your sitemap to your site.
  2. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click your site.
  3. Under Site configuration, click Sitemaps.
  4. In the text box, complete the path to your sitemap (for example, if the Sitemap is located at http://www.allanpollett.com/sitemap.xml, type sitemap.xml).
  5. Click Submit Sitemap.

The sitemap doesn't have to be just for Google. You can tell Google and other search engines about your sitemap by adding the following line to your robots.txt file (updating the sample URL with the complete path to your own sitemap):

Sitemap: http://www.allanpollett.com/sitemap_location.xml

This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn’t matter where it is located in your file. If you have a sitemap index file, you can include the location of just that file. You do not need to list each individual sitemap listed in the index file.

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Any questions about building Google sitemaps, please feel free to contact me at 905-417-9470 or by email at allanp73@gmail.com