Globalwarming Awareness2007

Sitemaps protocol permits the webmasters to inform serch engines about pages that compose their website. The first version of this protocol was made by Google, but the new version (0.90) has been made with the support of Yahoo and Microsoft. It helps spiders to crowl websites, but it isn’t indispensable to rank pages high in SERP.
If a webmaster want to give more information to serch engines with this protocol, he has to create a XML file. This file has to contain a list of the URLs of the site’s pages, with some optional information.
The optional attributes are:
Last modification: the date of last modification of the file.
Frequency of changes: how frequently a page is likely to change.
Priority: the priority of an URL relative to other URLs on your site.

All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.
This is an example of a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-02-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Each Sitemap file may contain a maximum of 50.000 URLs and it mustn’t weigh more than 10MB. Further these parameters it is necessary to create more Sitemaps files and a file called “Sitemap Index” that contains the list of Sitemaps files.
If you aren’t able to build a Sitemap by yourself, you can make it using an online tool called “Sitemap generator”.

Filed under: Sitemaps