XML Site Map | Are ALL Your Pages Indexed

Does Your Blog Have a Google XML Sitemap?

In 2005, Google introduced the XML sitemap format… in 2006 it was adopted by the Yahoo, Bing, and Ask search-engines. This gave publishers a standard format to follow for creating one sitemap that the top search engines could use.

You can find specifics about the protocol Below:


What are Sitemaps?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Because blogs can become very large, a sitemap is often needed to ensure that the major search engines can locate, crawl, and index each individual web page. However, creating a sitemap by hand every time you make a new blog post gets very boring and redundant.

Thankfully, there is a WordPress plug-in called Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress that takes all the work out of maintaining an up-to-date sitemap.

Once the plug-in is correctly installed, your sitemap is automatically rebuilt each time you make a new post. Not only that, the plug-in also pings the major search engines to alert them that you have updated your sitemap and added new content. This should bring them to your newly added web page(s).

This plug-in makes getting your web site fully indexed by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask incredibly easy. The more pages you have indexed, the more chances you have of being returned in the search results. This plug-in is free, and has consistently been updated to match each WordPress blogging software update. However, the developer does accept donations for his time and effort.

The Google XML SiteMap Generator is located at: http://net2get.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-add-google-sitemap-to-your.html. Once you upload and activate the XML SiteMap Generator, click on the link “XML-Sitemap” under your Settings menu in your back office Dashboard. Once this page opens you will notice that your sitemap has not been created.

Click on the link to create the sitemap… when it completes, navigate down the page adding or removing the information you would like, then click on the Update options button at the bottom… you are done! This will now rebuild your sitemap and notify the search engines that you have check marked, each time you create new content.

Now that you’ve created an XML sitemap, you should have the option to add a physical HTML sitemap to your site too. Your blog theme should have a location for adding an HTML sitemap… mine was offered as a Template under my Page Attributes area (right side) in the ‘Page Editing’ area.

Adding an HTML sitemap aids in human user-friendliness, and also helps your sites structure for search-engine indexing.

Closing Comments About the XML Site Map for Blogs!

I have read some articles to where the writer has the opinion that site maps are not crucial for search engine optimization. My personal opinion is, if there is any tool out there that can assist the search engines to crawl my site for proper indexing in their database, I’m all for it.