S.E.O

Sitemap Format Approved By Search Engines

Comments (0) 22.09.2007. 14:38

Sitemap Formats:

http://web.ondapc.com/cms/admin-sitemaps/

Did you know as of April 11th there was no longer a need to manually submit your sitemap to search engines. Last fall, the major search engines agreed on a sitemaps format. You can now add a simple line to your robots.txt file and let the engines know where your sitemap document resides on your site.

Just include the following line in your robots.txt file and you should be all set:

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Robots.txt has traditionally been used in a more prohibitive fashion - by telling search engine spiders where not to go on your site. This latest sitemaps implementation of robots.txt however is telling the spiders where TO go.

As ususal, sites can have multiple sitemaps:

handy html sitemap -- http://web.ondapc.com/sitemap/
yahoo sitemap 1 -- http://web.ondapc.com/yahoo_sitemap.xml
yahoo sitemap 2 -- http://www.ondapc.net/urllist.txt
google sitemap-- http://web.ondapc.com/google_sitemap.xml

Which one to choose? All, none, or one. That becomes the question for the next few months to come. Personally, I would not be surprised if the the Sitemap Specifications becomes the de-facto on web sitemaps. Why? Well, with all of the xml technologies that have come around, it seems appropriate that sitemaps, for as useful as they may be to search engines, should have their very own format.

Google = Ahead of the game. It is no wonder that Google has banked on this idea. Their search engine already comes ready to absorb the new ( well almost new ) Sitemap xml format. Yahoo and Microsoft, although trailing behind with RSS, text formats continue to have importance, one standard would help webmasters cope with the logistics of multiple site formats.

For us, database ready websites, we are just simply ready to go. We create our feed scripts, and regardless of what format sitemap we build for search engines it is a good practive to try to adhere to such formats.

So, your robots txt should have the following

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

line included. If you do so, you just might get ahead of those that are unable or unwilling to do so.