Sitemaps

Sitemaps is a protocol in XML format meant for a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for web crawling. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs of the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content. The Sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt , a URL exclusion protocol.

Sitemaps is a protocol in XML format meant for a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for web crawling. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs of the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more efficiently and to find URLs that may be isolated from the rest of the site's content. The Sitemaps protocol is a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt , a URL exclusion protocol. https://example.com/ 2006-11-18 daily 0.8 https://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz 2014-10-01T18:23:17+00:00 Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip, reducing bandwidth consumption. Multiple sitemap files are supported, with a Sitemap index file serving as an entry point. Sitemap index files may not list more than 50,000 Sitemaps and must be no larger than 50MiB and can be compressed. You can have more than one Sitemap index file. According to Google, a single property in Google Search Console can include up to 500 sitemap index files. Additionally, sitemaps that are referenced in a sitemap index file must be located in the same directory as the sitemap index file, or in a subdirectory lower in the site hierarchy. Best practice for optimising a sitemap index for search engine crawlability is to ensure the index refers only to sitemaps as opposed to other sitemap indexes; nesting a sitemap index within a sitemap index is invalid according to Google. In December 2011, Google announced the annotations for sites that want to target users in many languages and, optionally, countries. A few months later Google announced, on their official blog, that they are adding support for specifying the rel="alternate" and hreflang annotations in Sitemaps. Instead of the (until then only option) HTML link elements the Sitemaps option offered many advantages which included a smaller page size and easier deployment for some websites. One example of the multilingual sitemap would be as follows: If for example we have a site that targets English language users through https://www.example.com/en and Greek language users through https://www.example.com/gr , up until then the only option was to add the hreflang annotation either in the HTTP header or as HTML elements on both URLs like this But now, one can alternatively use the following equivalent markup in Sitemaps: https://www.example.com/en https://www.example.com/gr

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