Sitemaps now easier to manage, submit and scale!

Category: Google, Microsoft, SEO, Sitemaps, Webdesign, Yahoo

Today, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft (MSN/Live)  and Ask are all announcing cross-host submission for easier management of sitemaps. This will make it a lot easier for webmasters to manage multiple sitemaps.

Here is how it works:

For those of you not familiar with sitemaps, a sitemap is a file that contains the URLs for the pages on a website along with data such as the importance of the pages, the last date the page was updated and frequency of page content updates. Up to now, webmasters were required to upload their sitemaps onto the same host (domain) as the URLs within the sitemap. So into the root folder of the domain. This is all fine and well, but what is you have 1000’s of domains which constantly get updated!?

With today’s announcement, a sitemap can now be placed on a different domain (or even a different server) then where the actual website is located.

For example, you have a Sitemap called sitemap-example.xml for the URLs on http://www.example.com but you want to put that Sitemap on http://sitemaps.Another-Example.com. This is now possible!

Important! To validate the Sitemap, you must refer to it from the robots.txt file on the site where the URLs it contains are located. For example, add the following line to http://www.example.com/robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://sitemaps.Another-Example.com/sitemap-example.xml

That’s pretty simple right? Now, this will make life a lot easier for webmasters managing 100’s or 1000’s of websites.

One thing you need to be especially careful of, is to have the correct permissions on your robots.txt file so that others can modify it and call a different sitemap, which could be very beneficial to them and very damaging to you!