Many people consider XML Sitemaps as an optional extra, but the fact is XML Sitemaps help not only in the indexation of your pages by providing a full list of URLs on your website, but also to provide other useful information to search engines about your site. For example, by submitting "/" as your root domain instead of "default.aspx" through the XML Sitemap, search engines like Google might just figure out "/" is the main URL and this may help with the canonical issues.
Other benefits of XML Sitemaps include:
- Help to improve site crawl on a site
- Help the crawling of newer content
- Help spot problems or raise trouble flags (In the case of Google, problems are reported in Webmaster Tools)
Location of XML Sitemap
By default, the location of XML Sitemap can be assumed as your-site/sitemap.xml. If we have multiple sitemaps or our CMS generates files with some unique names, all we have to do is mention it by adding the following line in the robot.txt file:
Sitemap:
http://example.com/sitemap_locat...
Creating a XML Sitemap
It is highly recommended to use Sitemap 0.9 protocol as defined by
sitemaps.org. All the major search engines accept this standard protocol. There are many free tools available that can be used to create an XML Sitemap.
Xenu is one tool that crawls websites and also can be used to create an XML Sitemap.
Optimising XML sitemap
Sometimes,we might end up having thousands of URLs in a sitemap file. Google recommends not having more than 50,000 URLs or keeping the file size less than 10 MB. If our sitemap exceeds this limit, it is important to split the large file into multiple files and create a sitemap index file that lists all the sitemap files on your site. We will only need to submit the sitemap index file to the search engines. To optimise the sitemap files, we can also compress the file using zip.
Source:
Techment Technology End to EndSoftware and app solutions
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