Google Sitemaps

From ThinkLemon

Google Sitemaps is a service, in beta stage, from Google. With Google Sitemaps you can tell Google what pages can be crawled and indexed by the Google Search engine. This is done by placing a Sitemap-formatted XML file on the webserver containing an index of all indexable pages including last-edited timestamps of those pages.

Currently only Google uses the Sitemap file to decide what pages will be crawled, but the file could also be used by other search engines.

1 How to use
2 Example
3 Automatic creation
4 External References

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How to use

Generate a Sitemap manually or automatically
Submit the sitemap to Google Sitemaps
Wait for Google to start indexing

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Example

Below is an example of a Sitemap containing one entry:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.thinklemon.com/wiki/Google_Sitemaps</loc>
    <lastmod>2005-08-21T17:04:31 00:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.7</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

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Automatic creation

Sitemaps can be created automatically. Google provides tools for the generation of Sitemaps. But there are also Third-party tools for specific web applications like WordPress, vBulletin, phpBB, Coppermine, etc.

For the automatic generations of Sitemaps for Mediawiki see: MediaWiki:Google Sitemaps

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