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Sitemaps

Manually creating a Sitemap

This article covers general web Sitemaps, which are appropriate for most sites. Google does support some extensions for special Sitemap types. See the list below for specific instructions on how to create these special Sitemaps.


To create a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol:

  1. Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension.
  2. Add the following to the top of the file:
     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    
      <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  3. Add the following to the bottom of the file:
      </urlset>
  4. Create an entry for each URL. The <loc> tag is required; the others are optional.
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
        <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
        <priority>0.8</priority>
    </url> 
  5. Upload your Sitemap to your site. Then submit it to Google using Webmaster Tools.

updated 10/22/2012