Facts about Sitemap

  • 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.
  • Sitemap Protocol is supported by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
  • 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.
  • Once you have created your Sitemap, you can let search engines know about it by submitting directly to them, pinging them, or adding the Sitemap location to your robots.txt file.
  • Sitemap files must use UTF-8 encoding
  • Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB in length when uncompressed and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs.
  • The Sitemap defined by sitemaps.org is different from ASP.NET Site map (web.sitemap)
  • It is possible to convert a ASP.NET 2.0 site-map to a sitemaps.org Sitemap


More info:
Sitemaps FAQs from Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
sitemaps.org FAQ

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