Aug 03 2008

Standard Sitemap Protocol

Tag: General Web News — admin @ 8:10 pm

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo agreed on a standard for sitemaps using the XML standard.

Sitemaps.org is the official web site that describes the protocol.

The accepted standard is a sitemap created in XML.

Sample Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

<url><loc>http://www.smittysholdings.com/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-21T10:04:09-04:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The optional elements include:

  • the date the page was last modified
  • the frequency at which the page is likely to change
  • the priority of the page relative to other pages on the site. The priority is a numeric value between 0 and 1, and the default is set to 0.5. The idea is to set a higher priority value for pages that you consider more important and want to ensure that the crawlers give them priority

 

To learn more about XML sitemaps, visit sitemap.org