Sitemapswww.mihswat.com

Rafiq Phillips@rafiq

What are Sitemaps?

Inform Search EnginesAdditional 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 forgetYour 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/sitemap/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 KnowRobots.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