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A free service provided by Google.com
Webmaster Console to accelerate and ensure indexing of
sites.
This is helpful for any website specially good for dynamic websites
having lots of database driven pages.
XML sitemaps are an easy method to inform search engines about the
website content/pages.
XML sitemap lists URLs for a website along with additional
information like: date of update, how frequently usually changes,
and importance.
Sitemaps allow search engine crawlers that support XML sitemap to
crawl up all URLs in the Sitemap and access those URLs using the
associated information.
XML schema for the Sitemap protocol
The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags.
The Sitemap must follow these rules
Sitemap begins with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing
</urlset> tag
You should specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset>
tag.
Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.
Other tags are optional. You should refer to each search engine's
documentation for details.
Encapsulates the file and references the current
protocol standard.
<url>
required
Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining
tags are children of this tag.
<loc>
required
URL of the page. This URL must begin with the
protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your
web server requires it. This value must be less than 2,048
characters.
<lastmod>
optional
The date of last modification of the file. This
date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to
omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD.
Note that this tag is separate from the If-Modified-Since (304)
header the server can return, and search engines may use the
information from both sources differently.
<changefreq>
optional
How frequently the page is likely to change.
This value provides general information to search engines and
may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page.
Valid values are:
always
hourly
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly
never
The value "always" should be used to describe documents that
change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be
used to describe archived URLs.
Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and
not a command. Even though search engine crawlers may consider
this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages
marked "hourly" less frequently than that, and they may crawl
pages marked "yearly" more frequently than that. Crawlers may
periodically crawl pages marked "never" so that they can handle
unexpected changes to those pages.
<priority>
optional
The priority of this URL relative to other URLs
on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value
does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other
sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem
most important for the crawlers.
The default priority of a page is 0.5.
Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely
to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's
result pages. Search engines may use this information when
selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag
to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are
present in a search index.
Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the
URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority
is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your
site.
Entity escaping
Your XML Sitemap file must be UTF-8 encoded. As with any XML file,
any data values including URLs must use entity escape codes for the
characters listed in the table below.
Character
Escape Code
Ampersand
&
&
Single Quote
'
'
Double Quote
"
"
Greater Than
>
>
Less Than
<
<
In addition, all URLs (including the URL of your Sitemap) must be
URL-escaped and encoded for readability by the web server on which
they are located. However, if you are using any sort of script,
tool, or log file to generate your URLs (anything except typing them
in by hand), and this is usually already done for you. Please make
sure that your URLs follow the
RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the
RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and the
XML standard.
Below is an example of a URL that uses a non-ASCII character (ü), as
well as a character that requires entity escaping (&):
http://www.indian-seo.com/ümaster.asp&q=name
Below is that same URL, ISO-8859-1 encoded (for hosting on a server
that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:
http://www.indian-seo.com/%Actfo.asp&q=name
Below is that same URL, UTF-8 encoded (for hosting on a server that
uses that encoding) and URL escaped:
http://www.indian-seo.com/%C3%BTake.asp&q=name
Below is that same URL, but also entity escaped:
http://www.indian-seo.com/%C3%BTake.asp&q=name
Sample XML Sitemap
Example blow shows a Sitemap in XML format. This example contains a
small number of URLs, using a different set of optional parameters.
Content above originally taken from sitemaps.org, for any comments,
advice please write to
info@indian-seo.com
Indian SEO offer
compete SEO package that covers On Page Optimization, Off Page
Optimization. SEO Package includes webmaster account setup, XML
Sitemap creation and submission.
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