Site Map (sitemap) Common problem answers

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Last month, Trevor participated in the Search engine Strategy conference in Chicago, and in the "Sitemap: misuse, misuse or use of the right?" To speak at the points. We received a lot of good questions at the meeting, and we received some feedback from our help discussion area where we gave a FAQ:

Q: I submitted a site map, but my URL has not been crawled/indexed. Isn't the site map specifically designed for this purpose?

A: Submitting a sitemap can help you ensure that Google knows about URLs on your site. It is especially useful, especially if your content is not easily discovered by our crawler (for example, a page can only be accessed through a form). But not that we guarantee that these URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use the information from the site map to enhance our usual crawling and discovery process.

Q: If the site map can not help me automatically crawl and index, what can a site map do?

A: Sitemap provides Google with information to help us better understand your site. This includes ensuring that we know all of your URLs, when they are updated, how often they are updated, and their relative importance. In addition, if you submit your site map through webmaster tools, we will display some statistics, such as the number of URLs on your site being indexed.

Q: Will the site map help me get a better ranking?

A: The site map does not affect the actual ranking of your page. Of course, if it helps you get more web crawlers (because it lets us know the URLs we didn't know before, and/or help us to know the priority of your site URL, which will enable your site to increase presence in our index and the number of times it is displayed.

Q: If I set the priority of all pages to 1.0, would it make them rank higher (or faster to crawl) than others with a priority of 0.8?

Answer: No. As we said in our help Center, "priority ranking simply shows the importance of a particular Web site relative to other URLs on your site, and does not affect the ranking of pages in search results." If all of your pages have the same priority, this equates to you not providing any priority information.

Q: If all the metadata (, etc) for each URL is the same, or if I don't know if their metadata is accurate, is there any value in submitting such a site map?

A: If the value of a particular label is the same for all URLs in the site map, there is no need to include the tag in your site map. Of course, there is no harm involved, but it is essentially the same as not submitting any information because it does not help to differentiate your URL. If you are unsure whether your metadata is accurate (for example, you do not know when a URL is last modified), it is best to omit the label for those URLs, which is better than just creating a value that may not be accurate.

Q: I heard someone submitted a site map, and then his site was quickly punished. is the site map harmful to you?

A: Only when it falls on you from a very high place:. A joke. Serious's answer: If someone submits a site map and is punished, it is a coincidence. Google will never punish you for submitting a site map.

Q: Where do I put my Site map? Do you want to put it in the root of my site?

A: Not long ago, we opened the site map across the region to submit. That is, you can put your sitemap anywhere, as long as your site is validated by Webmaster tools. These sites include:

Site Map Site

The sites mentioned in the URLs in the Sitemap

Note that a cross-regional site map may only work for Google and may not work with other search engines. Learn more about site Map cross section submissions.

Q: My webmaster has built a site map for my site, can I just submit the sitemap? I have no concept of XML.

A: A site map built for (usually HTML) is designed to help people navigate your site. This is different from the XML site map built for search engines. Both of them are useful, preferably two. Site maps on your domain can also help search engines find your content (because crawling programs follow your links to find other pages). However, if you submit an HTML Sitemap to be used as a search engine site map, webmaster tools will report an error because an HTML page is not one of our recognizable sitemap formats. In addition, if you create an XML Web site, you can provide us with more information than an HTML sitemap (just a bunch of links). Learn more about our supported Sitemap formats.

Q: What kind of Site map format is the best?

A: We recommend sitemaps.org defined XML site map protocol. XML Sitemap is easy to upgrade: You can start with a simple (listing your URL only), but-unlike a text file site map-You can easily upgrade an XML sitemap later to include more meta data. Also, XML sitemap is more comprehensive than a site map submitted by an atom or RSS feed, because feeds usually only lists your most recent URLs (not all the sites you want the search engine to know).

Q: If I have multiple URLs pointing to the same content, can I use my sitemap to indicate my preferred URL for that content?

A: Yes. Although we cannot guarantee that our algorithm will display the URL in the search results, it is helpful to indicate in the site map the preferred URL for that content. When we decide which URL to display in our search results, we will consider your preference together with other signals. Learn more about duplicate content.

Q: Is it important to have a URL in a sitemap file? is the URL at the beginning of the file better handled than the URL placed at the end of the file?

A: It doesn't matter.

Q: If my site has multiple parts (such as blogs, forums, and albums), should I submit only one site map for the entire site, or submit multiple site maps (one part a map)?

A: The number of submitted site maps is set by you (at most these limits). Organize them in ways that you find easy to maintain. If you create multiple site maps, you can use the sitemap index file to list them all.

If your question is not answered here, you can find more questions and answers in our sitemap to help the discussion area.

Reprinted from: Google Chinese webmaster blog, collation: China SEO www.seocom.com.cn