Everything You Wanted To Know About Sitemaps But Where To Afraid To Ask

I used to think maintaining a sitemap was a royal pain before you could do it automatically with a range of tools. Sitemaps can have a visual html appearance so your visitors can get an overall look of your site and click through to the pages from there. But more importantly they are needed to help the search engines do their job properly of finding your pages and sticking you in their index.

The good thing is that the big three; Google, Yahoo and Bing all work with the one protocol which is an industry standard XML format. It’s basically a list of all your pages on the site and tells the crawlers what they should be looking for and when these URLs where changed last.

A sitemap can only contain 50,000 URLs, if your site gets over that number then you are certainly doing something right and will need to submit additional sitemaps. All about sitmap protocols can be found here.

The regular location of the sitemap is in the root level of your web host structure and needs to be named sitemap.xml, to actually generate the sitemap there are some options other than hand coding it.

A bunch of websites will do it for free but will push a few products in front of your eyes, one i have used is xml-sitemaps.com they will generate a file for free below 500 URLs which is a good starting point, you just punch in your URL and there you go, with this tool as well as an XML file they also generate a HTML which you can link to your site.

Google also has a free tool that allows fully automated sitemap generation and then schedule it to regenerate so its always up to date, you will need to have Python running on your server and preferably a console style access to it to run a few commands – it is initially a big harder to set up but will be easier in the long run to maintain. Download the script generator here.

The final thing to do is tell someone what you done! For Google you can sign into their webmaster tools and add your site and they will get you to paste in a meta tag on your home page to prove you control it and then they will use your sitemap! (You can do the same process with Bing)

Now if you self host your own WordPress site, you can skip a lot of work and use a Sitemap plugin (I should have put this at the beginning), by our German friend Arne Brachhold. This plugin allows you to put your feet up and have a coffee, it regenerates the sitemap when you change or add content – but even better it tells Google and Bing and a bunch of others about it!!

Once your sitemap is submitted with google or bing you can check if any internal links are broke and how many pages are indexed and when the last time the sitemap was submitted.

Related posts:

1. Sitemap for WordPress Plugin Update
2. Webmasters Unite