This is my list of things about Google Sitemaps I’m pretty certain about.
- “A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed.” Read more about Google Sitemaps.
- Sitemaps are used to let spiders know about pages on the site that is hard for spiders to get to. Don’t just submit top-level directories.
- Google also make use of the sitemap metadata. Priority and refresh cycle are important in telling G spider how often to crawl the page. Refresh cycle is useful in preventing Google from spidering the page too often.
- Add your images and videos to the sitemap.
- Add RSS feeds to the sitemap.
- Validate your sitemap.
- If you really need to know when the sitemap based crawling begins, then create a non-indexable page (having a NOINDEX robots META tag) which is not linked from anywhere, and put its URI in your sitemap.
- Use relative paths for ErrorDocument to enable verification. Relative paths do not redirect. Read more about sitemap verificaion.
- Google Sitemaps will not work with subdomains.
Google Sitemap FAQ - Read More...
