Several search engines support sitemaps. Sitemaps are either xml documents or plain text files that contain a list of URL’s that need to be indexed by search engines. The text file version is simple and straight-forward. I will discuss both the text and xml versions.
Text:
A simple text file that contains one URL per line.
https://www.example.com/file1.html
https://www.example.com/file2.htmlXML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/file1.html</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>Most of these are self-explanatory.
lastmod – Needs to be in W3C format.
Year:
YYYY (eg 1997)
Year and month:
YYYY-MM (eg 1997-07)
Complete date:
YYYY-MM-DD (eg 1997-07-16)
Complete date plus hours and minutes:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20+01:00)
Complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00)
Complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds and a decimal fraction of a
second
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00)
where:
YYYY = four-digit year
MM = two-digit month (01=January, etc.)
DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)
hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed)
mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59)
ss = two digits of second (00 through 59)
s = one or more digits representing a decimal fraction of a second
TZD = time zone designator (Z or +hh:mm or -hh:mm)changefreq – This value is optional and needs to be between 0 and 1.0. The default value is 0.5.
There are some restrictions on the number of entries and size. The maximum number of URL’s per file is 50,000 and the maximum size is 50 Mb (uncompressed).
I am planning to provide some C# code snippets for generating XML sitemaps in the next few days. I had some code and generated sitemaps for the alpha version of PodDB, but now I am kind of integrating into the application i.e now the codebase would handle every update, removal, addition, planned for version 0.2.3 (New Year’s release).
Further references:
Google – Build and submit a sitemap
–
Mr. Kanti Kalyan Arumilli
B.Tech, M.B.A
Founder & CEO, Lead Full-Stack .Net developer
ALight Technology And Services Limited
Phone / SMS / WhatsApp on the following 3 numbers:
+91-789-362-6688, +1-480-347-6849, +44-07718-273-964
+44-33-3303-1284 (Preferred number if calling from U.K, No WhatsApp)
kantikalyan@gmail.com, kantikalyan@outlook.com, admin@alightservices.com, kantikalyan.arumilli@alightservices.com, KArumilli2020@student.hult.edu, KantiKArumilli@outlook.com and 3 more rarely used email addresses – hardly once or twice a year.
