Sitemaps continued. XML Sitemaps – In the previous article, we went over the importance of organization, text links and a site map in order to improve your sites spiderability. One thing we didn’t go over was the importance of site maps for sites that have a very large amount of pages. Most search engine spiders will only follow a limited number of links from a page. If you have a very large number of links, a site map may be required to allow search engines as well as visitors access to all the content on your site.
As websites grew larger and more complex it became difficult for search engines to keep track of all this constantly changing content. Giant e-Commerce sites, large forums, and frequently updated blogs needed to be spidered thoroughly and frequently. The existing search methods weren’t efficient when dealing with these types of sites. Spiders would often skip over important content on these rapidly changing sites making it harder to find the information you might be searching for.
The need for the new sitemap protocol arose and Google responded. In the summer of 2005 Google launched a new Sitemap protocol version .84 using the XML file format.
The XML protocol allowed, search engines to track URLs more efficiently, optimizing their search by placing all the information inside one file. XML was also able to summarize how frequently a particular website is updated and note when changes were last made. This allowed for more accurate searches and rankings. What started as a project to streamline and optimize search procedures for the Google search engine, ended up being adopted by rival search technology companies because Google made a smart move by releasing the XML protocol under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons License.
XML Sitemaps are now supported by Microsoft as well as Yahoo. Great news for webmasters! This new Sitemap consists of a hosted XML file. This file is usually named sitemap.xml . The file needs to be UTF-8 encoded and needs to follow the following rules:
- Begin with an opening tag and end with a closing tag.
- Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the tag.
- Include a entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
- Include a child entry for each parent tag.
Also, all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com. For further details, refer the Sitemap file location on sitemaps.org. You can find a multiple URL example on that site as well.
http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly
0.8
