Sitemap.xml it’s a file with information about the site’s page addresses for search engines. This file tells search engines which pages to index. The content of the file is not a strict indication for search engines to take actions, but only serves as a suggestion for scanning and indexing the necessary site pages. Creating sitemap.xml for your new site, you make it easier for search robots to crawl your site.
Example Sitemap.xml
An example of what it might look like sitemap.xml. (it describes only one page of the site)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://site.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2015-15-05</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0/priority>
</url>
</urlset>
How to use it Sitemap.xml
The file is placed in the root directory of the site so that it is available at http://site.com/sitemap.xml. The file must contain no more than 50,000 URLs and no more than 10 MB in size. If you need to specify more than 50,000 URLs, create several Sitemap files
Checking the correctness of the created file
To define elements and attributes that can appear in Sitemap files, use the following XML schemas::
- For Sitemap files: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
- For Sitemap index files: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd
Online validators:
- Yandex — https://webmaster.yandex.ru/tools/sitemap/?tab=url
- Google — https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list
Notifying search engines
After creating the site map file and placing it, you need to notify the site created and hosted on the web server, you need to notify search engines about its location.
This operation can be performed using several methods:
- using the webmaster panel of the search engine
- by specifying the file location in the file robots.txt
- using a special search engine query (how to create a query is described below)
Queries to search engines:
- Google — http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
- Yandex — http://webmaster.yandex.ru/wmconsole/sitemap_list.xml?host=
Sitemap.xml in search engine directories: