NEED INFO+ URL SUBMISSION

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is anXML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites where:

• some areas of the website are not available through the browsable interface, or
• webmasters use rich Ajax, Silverlight, or Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. Using this protocol does not guarantee that web pages will be included in search indexes, nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked in search results.

Element definitions

The definitions for the elements are shown below

Element	Required?	Description
	Yes	The document-level element for the Sitemap. The rest of the document after the '' element must be contained in this.
	Yes	Parent element for each entry. The remaining elements are children of this.
	Yes	Provides the full URL of the page, including the protocol (e.g. http, https) and a trailing slash, if required by the site's hosting server. This value must be less than 2,048 characters.
	No	The date that the file was last modified, in ISO 8601 format. This can display the full date and time or, if desired, may simply be the date in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
	No	How frequently the page may change: always hourly daily weekly monthly yearly never 'Always' is used to denote documents that change each time that they are accessed. 'Never' is used to denote archived URLs (i.e. files that will not be changed again). This is used only as a guide for crawlers, and is not used to determine how frequently pages are indexed.
	No	The priority of that URL relative to other URLs on the site. This allows webmasters to suggest to crawlers which pages are considered more important. The valid range is from 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 being the most important. The default value is 0.5. Rating all pages on a site with a high priority does not affect search listings, as it is only used to suggest to the crawlers how important pages in the site are to one another.

Search engine submission

If Sitemaps are submitted directly to a search engine (pinged), it will return status information and any processing errors. The details involved with submission will vary with the different search engines. The location of the Sitemap can also be included in the robots.txt file by adding the following line to robots.txt:

Sitemap:  

The should be the complete URL to the Sitemap, such as: http://www.example.org/sitemap.xml. This directive is independent of the user-agent line, so it doesn't matter where it is placed in the file. If the website has several Sitemaps, this url can simply point to the main Sitemap index file.

The following table lists the Sitemap submission URLs for several major search engines:

Search engine	Submission URL	Help page
Google	http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=	Submitting a Sitemap
Yahoo!	http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url= http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=	Does Yahoo! support Sitemaps?
Ask.com	http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=	Q: Does Ask.com support sitemaps?
Bing (Live Search)	http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=	Bing Webmaster Tools
Yandex	—	Sitemaps files