Sitemaps
The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about pages of his website, which is to be read from it. The standard was adopted on 16 November 2006 from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. It is an XML-based standard.
The aim of the Sitemaps protocol is an improvement of the results. The uniform standard will help in the establishment of this type of "labeling" of a website because not as a separate sitemap file must be created before remediation for each search engine.
History
The Sitemaps protocol is based on the idea of crawler - friendly web servers.
Google released in June 2005, the technology Sitemaps 0.84. With this technique webmaster could publish a list of links to their site.
In November 2006, MSN and Yahoo revealed details to accept the Sitemaps protocol. The revision identifier was changed to 0.90 sitemaps, but the protocol remains unchanged.
In April 2007, Ask.com and IBM joined the standard. At the same time announced Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to support the recognition of Sitemap files by the Robots Exclusion Standard.
XML sitemap format
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Sitemap files are ordinary text files that use the Extensible Markup Language. Sitemap files must use the character encoding UTF -8.
As an alternative to the extensive XML notation Sitemap files can be ordinary text files that contain only a list of URLs, for example in the form
Http://example.com/seite1.html http://example.com/verzeichnis/seite2.html http://example.com/bild3.png The standard also requires that sitemap files, no matter what form, also can be compressed gzip.
The file name of Sitemap files, unlike in robots.txt files, basically irrelevant. Also playing file extensions, even with GZIP compression, no role.
Restrictions
Sitemap files are allowed on the protocol as a whole contain no more than 50,000 URLs and not exceed 10 MB ( 10,485,760 bytes). When using compressed Sitemap files are not compressed Sitemap file must also not be larger than 10 MB. This limitation can be circumvented by multiple Sitemap files are used to applying a " main " site map that points to a maximum of 50,000 Sitemaps. In this way, theoretically 50,000 × 50,000 = 2,500,000,000 ( 2.5 billion ) URLs writable.
Example
< urlset xmlns = " http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 "
xmlns: xsi = " http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance "
xsi: schemaLocation = " http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd " >
Unlike robots.txt files are not necessarily published in a special place on the website sitemaps files, but any search engine directly sent ( in a one Pingback similar method). These are then returned status issues or errors occurred while processing the Sitemaps file. The passed in this submission data, that is, the inquiry template and output format are strongly dependent on the search engine used, the sitemaps standard makes no statement about it.
Alternatively, the address of a sitemap file can be included in the robots.txt by the line at any position
Sitemap: sitemap_url inserts, which sitemap_url represents the complete URL to the Sitemap. This information is evaluated independently of the user-agent context, therefore, the position of the line does not matter. It has a web presence via multiple Sitemaps, this URL should point to the main sitemap.