Introduction to Sitemap Mostly Used in Google

In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need.

XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we'll be discussing in this post.

In general meaning, a Sitemap is a list of the pages contained within your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps google search engine to know about of all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Sitemap will bring benefit if your site has the following features:

• If your site contents are dynamic.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process.
• Your site is created newly and has very little numbers of link on it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:

• How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
• The date each page was last modified.
• The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact the ranking of your pages in search results.

Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can't guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org. The Sitemap Protocol is a dialect of XML for summarizing Sitemap information that is relevant to web crawlers. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org.While a standard Sitemap works for most sites, you can also create and submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content. These Sitemap formats are specific to Google and are not used by other search engines. They're a good way to give Google detailed information about specific content types. For example, publishers can use News Sitemaps to give Google information that can appear in Google News search results, such as publication date, keywords, and stock ticker symbol. Sitemap formats include:

Video Sitemaps
Mobile Sitemaps
News Sitemaps
Code Search Sitemaps Geo Sitemaps

What can a Sitemap contain?
Keep in mind the following for Sitemaps of any format:

• A Sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of Sitemaps.
• If your Sitemap contains a list of other Sitemaps, you should save it as a Sitemap index file and use the XML format provided for that file type. A Sitemap index file cannot list more than 1,000 Sitemaps.
• A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.
• Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, if you specify your site location as http://www.example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://example.com/. And if you specify your site location as http://example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://www.example.com/.
• Do not include session IDs in URLs.
• Do not include direct image URLs in Sitemaps. Google does not index the image directly; instead, we index the page on which the image appears. Direct image URLs included in Sitemaps won't be indexed.
• The Sitemap URL must be encoded for readability by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can't contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it.

Will Google crawl and index all of the URLs in my Sitemap?
Google doesn't take guarantee to crawl or index all of your URLs. For example, google won't crawl or index image URLs contained in your Sitemap. However, they use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow google to improve it's crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

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