Home > Glossary > XML Sitemap
Sitemap.xml is a specific file that contains information about website pages that are being indexed. It contains the URLs of the pages. In simple terms, this is a kind of guide for search engines, which tells them what content is available on the site and how to find it.
It can be static and dynamic. The static one is created manually (or using various online services). The dynamic one is generated automatically, at the time specified by the user.
The sitemap lists pages in the following format:
<url> <loc> http://jeder.ru/index.php </loc> <lastmod> 2008-10-27T18: 00: 15 + 00: 00 </lastmod> <priority> 1.00 </priority> < changefreq> daily </changefreq> </url>
Where tags mean:
- <url> </url> is a required tag, it serves to indicate the beginning and end of the page block, including information on its indexing
- <code> </loc> – also a required tag, used to indicate the page address;
- <lastmod> </lastmod> – an optional attribute, used to indicate the date of the last page refresh
- <code> <priority> is an optional attribute, its value indicates the priority of the page. The value should be between 1.00 and 0.1, so the highest priority is 1/00 and lowest 0.1;
- <changefreq> </changefreq> is an optional attribute which value is the page refresh rate.
There are many services out there to generate a sitemap. For example:
- www.sitemapgenerator.com
- www.xml-sitemaps.com
- www.sitemapwriter.com
After you have created a sitemap, you need to inform the search engines about it.
You might need a Sitemap when:
- The site is large. This can lead Google crawlers to skip recently created or modified pages.
- The site contains a large archive of pages that are not related to each other. To be crawled successfully, they should be listed in the Sitemap file.
- The site is new and few links point to it. Googlebot and other search robots crawl the Internet by following links from one page to another. If there are few links to a site, it will be difficult to find.
- The site contains a lot of multimedia (video and images) or news content. The search engine can obtain additional information from Sitemap files to be displayed in search results.
