Submit Sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing

A sitemap is a list of links which you want to be crawled by search engines. Submitting a sitemap can help to ensure that the important search engines crawl and index your pages, although it does not guarantee it. In this post I explain how to create and submit your sitemaps to important search engines.

Sitemaps allow a webmaster to tell search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It also 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 efficiently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. It is now possible to indicate a sitemap in the robots.txt.

Create a Sitemap
First you should get the full sitemap to your site. You can create a sitemaps file in various ways. Google provides the Sitemap Generator program, which you can install on your Web server; it’s a Python script, so if you don’t know what that means, consider creating the file another way. Plenty of free and low-cost sitemap-creation tools are available, for example on-line sitemap generator, where you enter your page address and you get an XML sitemap out.

Often feeds are accepted, however you should make sure to use a complete feed, rather than a shortened, incomplete one, which is default. If the feed only includes a few recent posts, all others might not get indexed. In blogger you can't edit the robot.txt, but you can set up your default feed in the feed configurations.

For atom feeds, if you have less than 500 posts, a link to a complete feed would be " atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500. This would usually appended to the base link of your site."

Submitting the Sitemap to Search Engines
You can submit sitemaps via webmaster tools or via ping. We'll first look at the webmaster tools. They give finer control over crawling and provide tools for analyzing the performance of your site.

The other mechanism for submitting sitemaps is via ping. A ping is a mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. I list here the ping servers for google, yahoo, bing, ask.com, and moreover.com. Substitute the last part for your sitemap link.

1.  http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
2.  http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
3.  http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=http://YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
4.  http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
5.  http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://YourSite.com/sitemap.xml
6.  http://www.moreover.com/ping?sitemap=http://YourSite.com/sitemap.xml

Submitting a sitemap is no garantee that search machine will index all pages. Additionally it can be useful to link your articles among themselves and to get many inbound links.