Sitemap for Google—Quickly Generate and Submit Your Sitemap to Google

Have been suggested to build a sitemap for Google to have your site quickly indexed? Well, if your site is facing an indexing problem, it is very necessary to do so. But before you start building sitemap for Google, there are still some things you need to figure out.

 

Why Google Encourages Webmasters to Submit Sitemap?

 

Since more and more sites come up with increasing size and complex hierarchy, it is hard for search engine bots to keep track of all materials provided by websites. Therefore, indexing all contents in time becomes a big problem for search engines. To solve this problem, in 2005, one of the search engine giants—Google, introduced the Sitemap protocol, and recommended webmasters to submit XML sitemap to search engines based on this protocol.

This kind of sitemap —XML sitemap is primarily designed for the search engines to help them find the data faster and more efficiently. Through the XML sitemap, search engines bots can track the URLs more efficiently, especially for those that may not be discovered by normal crawling process. As a result, search engines will greatly facilitate the indexing process and webmasters' efforts to build a website will be no longer left unseen.

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What Is a Standard Sitemap for Google?

 

According to Sitemap protocol, a standard sitemap consists of XML tags that are defined by Google. This sitemap should contain no more than 50,000 URLs, and must be no larger than 10 MB. Following is an example shows a standard sitemap that contains one URL (with explanations on the right side):

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=who</loc>……………………… (location of this page)
<lastmod>2011-12-12</lastmod>………………………………(last time this page changes)
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>…………………………(how often this page changes)
<priority>0.8</priority>……………………………...(how important this page to the website)
</url>
</urlset>

 

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Does My Site Need Such a Sitemap?

 

If your site is in one of these situations, then definitely you need one:

Your site is a brand new one and has few back links;
Your site has numerous content pages and a complex hierarchy;
The content pages of your site are not well linked to each other, or worse, they are not linked at all;
Your site is a forum or a blog including lots of rapidly changing pages which are usually skipped by crawlers;
Your site has dynamic content, especially when your site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or Java Script menus that do not include HTML links;
Your site is a B2B or a B2C forum that contains thousands even millions of products in the catalogues which require frequent update;
Your site has indexing problems and therefore cannot reach high rankings in search engine results.

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How to Build a Standard Sitemap for My Site?

 

The whole process of sitemap building is made up of three steps: sitemap creation, sitemap upload, and search engine notification. You can certainly accomplish the entire process manually, but if your site has a large number of content pages, the manual way would be problematic and troublesome: it is quite likely that you may omit some web pages or you may make mistakes in adding metadata to URLs, which would result in a incomplete or invalid sitemap; you probably have to spend hours even days to finish sitemap creation, and then another hours or days to examine the created sitemap; every time there is a update on your site, you need to recreate, re-upload a new sitemap, and re-ping search engines.

Alternatively, you can apply an auto sitemap tool to help you build a sitemap.

 

SiteMap X is such a sitemap tool which can automatically generate complete and valid sitemaps (not only XML, but also HTML, GZ and TXT), upload the generated sitemaps to server, and ping search engines of the updated sitemap in minutes.

 

Just set a schedule, and let SiteMap X automatically and instantly accomplish the whole process of sitemap building for you. It will save you much time and energy, and moreover, you can get a full version of SiteMap X at no expense! Build a sitemap now!

 

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