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XML Sitemap Generator
About XML Sitemap Generator
What is it?
Check if the website has a sitemap. A sitemap is important as it lists all the web pages of the site and let search engine crawlers to crawl the website more intelligently. A sitemap also provides valuable metadata for each webpage.
In order to pass this test you must create a sitemap.xml file for your website. Some of the best practices are listed below:
- It is strongly recommended that you place your sitemap at the root directory of your website: http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml But in some situations, you may want to produce different sitemaps for different paths on your site (e.g., security permission issues)
- Sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. This means that if your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or your sitemap is bigger than 10MB, you must create multiple sitemap files and use a Sitemap index file
- All URLs listed in the sitemap must reside on the same host as the sitemap. For instance, if the sitemap is located at http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml, it can't include URLs from http://subdomain.yourwebsite.com
- Once you have created your sitemap, let search engines know about it by submitting directly to them, pinging them, or adding the sitemap location to your robots.txt file
- Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip, reducing bandwidth consumption
sitemap.xml example:
http://www.yourwebsite.com 2013-01-01 weekly 0.9 http://www.yourwebsite.com/articles/100 weekly http://www.yourwebsite.com/articles/101 2013-01-02 weekly http://www.yourwebsite.com/articles/102 2013-01-02T13:00:12+00:00 0.5
