- Image by Colin Zhu via Flickr
Google has just made it a little easier to submit your sitemap. You no longer have to specify a sitemap file type. Google will determine the type of data you’re submitting automatically.
If you have multiple Sitemap files that you wish to submit to Google, you can include up to 1,000 of these in an XML Sitemap Index file. If you have more than 1,000 Sitemap files, you can just submit multiple Sitemap Index files.
Once you have your Sitemap files ready and available on your server, all that’s left is making sure that the search engines can find them. Google supports three simple ways to submit Sitemap files:
- Using Google Webmaster Tools
Submitting your Sitemap files through Google Webmaster Tools is the preferred way of letting Big G know about them. - Listing Sitemap files in the robots.txt file
Another way of submitting a Sitemap file is to specify the URL in your robots.txt file. If you use this method of submitting a Sitemap file, it will be found by all search engines that support the Sitemaps protocol. - Using an HTTP “ping”
If your Sitemap files are generated automatically, a convenient way to submit (and re-submit) them is to access the “ping” URL for Google Sitemaps.
Search engines that are a members of sitemaps.org support a similar way of submitting general web Sitemap files.
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