What is XML Sitemap?

What is XML Sitemap?

In general, this is a list of URLs for your website in a form of XML file (it also known asGoogle Sitemap because it was introduced first by Google). Besides that it allows you to include additional SEO-specific information about each URL such as the date it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is. XML format ensures that this information can be easily processed on different kinds of computers, applications and systems, so Search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Baidu, AOL, Yandex etc) won't have any problems with understanding your sitemap files.

XML Sitemap sample:

        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

        <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

            <url>

                <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

                <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>

                <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

                <priority>0.8</priority>

            </url>

            <url>

                <loc>http://www.example.com/about.htm</loc>

                <changefreq>daily</changefreq>

            </url>

        </urlset>
        

The sitemap example above contains 2 URLs and all of the allowed optional tags:<lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority>.

There are a couple of limitations imposed by Google: a single XML sitemap file can contain not more then 50,000 URLs and may not be larger than 10 Megabytes.