Google requires a sitemap file to websites for them to tell all the pages, information about those pages, which pages are the most important and how often they change. By submitting a Sitemap file to Google, you can take control of the first part of the crawling/indexing processes and that is to let Google discover your pages.
This may be particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content, pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, or if your site is new and has few links to it.
Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell Google the information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps. Other factors include how many sites link to you, if your content is unique and relevant, if Google can crawl the pages successfully, and everything outlined in their webmaster guidelines.
A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace Google’s normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never penalized for using this service. This is a beta program, so Google cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to their index. Over time, Google expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as they refine their processes and better understand webmasters' needs.
Once you have created your Sitemap, you can add it to your Google Sitemaps account and update it as your site changes.
Keep in mind the following for Sitemaps of any format:
This may be particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content, pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, or if your site is new and has few links to it.
Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell Google the information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps. Other factors include how many sites link to you, if your content is unique and relevant, if Google can crawl the pages successfully, and everything outlined in their webmaster guidelines.
A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace Google’s normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never penalized for using this service. This is a beta program, so Google cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to their index. Over time, Google expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as they refine their processes and better understand webmasters' needs.
Once you have created your Sitemap, you can add it to your Google Sitemaps account and update it as your site changes.
Keep in mind the following for Sitemaps of any format:
- A Sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of Sitemaps.
- If your Sitemap contains a list of other Sitemaps, you should save it as a Sitemap index file and use the XML format provided for that file type. A Sitemap index file cannot list more than 1,000 Sitemaps.
- A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.
- Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, if you specify your site location as http://www.example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://example.com/. And if you specify your site location as http://example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://www.example.com/.
- Completely specify each URL. For instance, include the protocol (such as http://) and include all required trailing slashes.
- Do not include session IDs in URLs.
- The Sitemap URL must be encoded for readability by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can't contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it.
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