Sitemaps and how to create them
Created: | Updated:A sitemap is a great thing to promote the proper links to search engines. So let’s see how such a sitemap is looking like.
Simple sitemap file
A basic sitemap file has the following structure. You can use such sitemaps for up to 50.000 entries:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.alooha.com/sitemap_travel.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2014-11-07</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
Linking to sitemaps for large sites
This is a general sitemap linking to some others because there should be a limit of 50.000 links per sitemap:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.alooha.com/sitemap_travel.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2014-11-07</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
And here the sitemap file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.alooha.net/language.html?start=0</loc>
<lastmod>2014-11-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Details can be found at Build a sitemap.
You can (should) also add the sitemap to your robots.txt
file. Be aware that it should be a full URL (unlike the one I used over here):
Sitemap: /sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Allow: /