About Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

In addition to regular Sitemaps, you can also create Sitemaps designed to give Google information about specialized web content, including video, mobile, News, Code Search, and geographical (KML) information.

When you update your site by adding or removing pages, tell Google about it by resubmitting your Sitemap. Google doesn't recommend creating a new Sitemap for every change.

What do you want to do?

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

* Your site has dynamic content.
* Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
* Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
* Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide additional information about your site, such as the date it was last updated, and how often you expect the page to change.

Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org