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Support - Search Engine Sitemap

What is the difference between a traditional site map and a search engine site map?

A traditional site map serves as a local table of contents for all the pages within your site. A search engine site map consists of a local XML document that is used by popular search engines to help index pages from your web site when they crawl your web site for pages to add to their directory.

Why should I generate a search engine site map?

When you generate a search engine site map, popular search engines will be able to more efficiently index your site based on many variables including the date the page was last modified, how often a single page is updated and the weight or priority of one page over another.

How do I generate a search engine site map?

A search engine site map is created using the extensible markup language or XML. XML is a structured markup language used for organizing documents including text, images, etc. A technical introduction to XML is available here: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

Similar to HTML, XML uses markup tags to define a document structure. The XML document must be UTF-8 encoded. Here is an example of a simple search engine sitemap XML document:

< urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" >
   < url >
      < loc >http://www.mywebsite.com/< /loc >

      < lastmod >2005-01-01< /lastmod >
      < changefreq >monthly< /changefreq >
      < priority >0.8< /priority >
   < /url >
< /urlset >

Information regarding the search engine site map syntax and markup tags are covered in more detail on the sitemaps.org site.

You will then place the XML document into the root folder of your website. The path to the search engine site map will look similar to the example below:

http://www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml

If you decide you would like to generate a site map for a specific section of your website you can do this by creating a new XML document and place it in a specific folder of your site. For example, if you wanted to limit the search engine to all the pages pulled from your ARCHIVES folder then the path to the search engine site map would look similar to the example below:

http://mywebsite.com/archives/sitemap.xml

Are there tools for generating sitemaps?

If you have your own server, we recommend that you look at Google's list of third party tools. If you are running Python on your server, you may want to use Google's Sitemap Generator.

If you are a shared hosting client, contact support@adhost.com and we will assist you.

What do I do after I generate a search engine site map?

Once you have finished creating your search engine site map you will submit this to the search engine(s) of your choice. Please consult the individual search engine submission guidelines regarding the proper way to submit your search engine site map.

Google Webmaster Central
Yahoo's Webmaster Help

Where can I go to learn more about the search engine sitemap protocol?

General:sitemaps.org
Syntax:sitemaps.org/ protocol
FAQ:sitemaps.org/faq