“Get Your Website Indexed Quicker
With Google Sitemaps!”

Step By Step Guide To Creating & Submitting Your
Your Own Sitemap To Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is a new service by Google to help you submit your complete URL list so that Google can spider and index your website content easier and quicker.

But you could anyway submit your homepage to Google and then it would spider your whole website. Google also used to discover your site trough links on other websites (in fact Google prefers this). So what's new?

Now you don't have to depend on Google to discover all the pages of your site on its own. Actually Google may still manage to find out about your static pages. However it is a different ballgame when you have dynamic URLs like www.eample.com/show.php?cat=123&prod=135.

Google is paranoid about getting into an endless loop when it encounters dynamic URLs and unless you really help it out with static and direct links to such URLs, it refuses to index your site properly.

Google sitemaps comes to the rescue in such cases.

Here is the step by step guide to creating and submitting your sitemap to Google Sitemaps --

1. Create the sitemap XML file.

2. Create a FREE Google account (if you don't already have one). Visit Google sitemaps login page and click on Create a Google account in the right hand column.

3. Submit your sitemap. Login to Sitemaps console and click on "Add a Sitemap +" link near the top. Now enter the exact URL of your sitemap file like https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

4. Wait for the sitemap to be picked up. You can watch the 'downloaded' column on the Sitemaps console and get an estimate of the date and time when your sitemap was last downloaded by Google. Just remember that Google has not spidered your website at the exact time it has downloaded your sitemap.

5. Wait for your site to be spidered. Your logs will tell you the exact details about the date and time your files got spidered. You can also notice this when your pages get refreshed in the Google index. Search for site:domain.com in Google and see if you get a date besides the URL.

Sitemap File Structure

Google prefers to receive your sitemap as an XML file or even GZipped XML file if your sitemap is large.

This is what a typical sitemap XML file looks like --

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="//www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="//www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="//www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
//www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
<updatefreq>monthly</updatefreq>
<lastmod>2005-06-10T13:39:35Z</lastmod>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/page1.htm</loc>
<updatefreq>monthly</updatefreq>
<lastmod>2005-06-06T13:42:00Z</lastmod>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Some Important parameters used in Google Sitemap

loc -- This is the URL of your file.

updatefreq -- This can contain 'monthly', 'yearly', 'daily' or 'always' and is an indicator of the frequency at which this page is updated.

lastmod -- date on which this page was last modified.

When you update any page, you will do well to change this value so that Google will know about your update.

The complete details about the Sitemap contents are here.

Hand-coding your sitemap

If your site contains only a few pages (typically less than 50), you may consider hand-coding your sitemap file in Notepad or a similar text editor. This way, you will not have to bother with any auto-sitemap generator software as each of these programs may introduce several issues of their own.

Copy the above sample sitemap text into a file called sitemap.xml. Edit this file using Notepad or any other text-based editor and put as many <URL/> ... </URL> sections as required. Upload this file to the root directory of your site (where you store your index.htm or default.htm file) and submit to Google.

Programs to auto-generate Sitemap

Python based

Google offers a Python based sitemap generator program on its site, for generating the sitemap.

However you may not like to go this route as this requires your server to have Python 2.2 or above, you should have Telnet access to your hosting space and a fairly advanced knowledge of the file structure of your server.

You will also need to thoroughly edit the resulting sitemap file as there will be many more files than you will like to inlcude.

PHP based

phpSitemapNG has quickly become a popular choice for people wanting to create their sitemap file. This software is based on PHP and does not require Telnet access to the server.

This sitemap generator requires you to --

• FTP some files to your server
• Change the file rights for 2 files through CHMOD option of the FTP program
• Run the phpSitempaNG program setup
• Create the sitemap file

Windows based

Some tools are being developed as Windows based software that will generate the sitemap file. I am yet to test any of these.

Web based

Some people are offering web based sitemap generation services. I am yet to get satisfactory result with any of these.

Important precautions before you submit your sitemap to Google Sitemaps

You need to be very careful before you submit your sitemap to Google Sitemaps. I am not trying to scare you here.

However if you are not careful, you may really expose some unwanted areas of your website. Here is a small checklist --

1. You absolutely must go through the entire file to make sure that no unwanted file has been included in the sitemap. If you sell any software or ebooks, these possibly reside on your website and may get included in the sitemap. You don't want everyone to access your stuff for FREE. Do you?

2. You might have created a slighly different version of your main index file or other files to test conversion or ranking or something else. You may even be having different copies to use with different PPC programs. You do not want Google to be indexing all these files, so remove them from the sitemap you are going to submit.

3. You might know that Google prefers to have the home page of your site to be referred as http://www.example.com/ and not http://www.example.com/index.htm. However your auto-generator program might have listed this as http://www.example.com/index.htm only. You must change this to http://www.example.com/ or else Google may confuse these as duplicate content and penalise you.

4. Your dynamic URLs may have been listed with the session ID like this -
http://www.example.com/page.php?sessionID=245433DE434AF. You need to remove the session ID from this URL for best results.

5. Read the Google Sitemaps Frequently Asked Questions.

I strongly believe that you can reap rich dividends if you can create a clean sitemap and submit to Google for getting all your pages indexed much quicker.

Go ahead, create your first sitemap and submit to Google, right away.

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