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XML Sitemap Format

The Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

A sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below. The optional tags are in italics.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
< urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
< url>
< loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
< lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
< changefreq>daily</changefreq>
< priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The Sitemap must:
Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
Include a <url> entry for each URL as a parent XML tag.
Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap in XML format. The Sitemap in the example contains a small number of URLs, each of which is identified using the <loc> XML tag. In this example, a different set of optional parameters has been provided for each URL.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=12&amp;desc=vacation_hawaii</loc>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=73&amp;desc=vacation_new_zealand</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=74&amp;desc=vacation_newfoundland</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>0.3</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/catalog?item=83&amp;desc=vacation_usa</loc>
<lastmod>2004-11-23</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>

You can compress your Sitemap files using gzip. Compressing your Sitemap files will reduce your bandwidth requirement. Please note that your uncompressed Sitemap file may not be larger than 10MB.Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)

You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760) when uncompressed. These limits help to ensure that your web server does not get bogged down serving very large files.

If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files. If you anticipate your Sitemap growing beyond 50,000 URLs or 10MB, you should consider creating multiple Sitemap files. If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you can list them in a Sitemap index file. Sitemap index files may not list more than 1,000 Sitemaps.

The XML format of a Sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a Sitemap file. The Sitemap index file uses the following XML tags:
loc
lastmod
sitemap
sitemapindex

Note: A Sitemap index file can only specify Sitemaps that are found on the same site as the Sitemap index file. For example, http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml can include Sitemaps on http://www.yoursite.com but not on http://www.example.com or http://yourhost.yoursite.com. As with Sitemaps, your Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.

Sample XML Sitemap Index

The following example shows a Sitemap index in XML format. The Sitemap index lists two Sitemaps:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Note: Sitemap URLs, like all values in your XML files, must be entity escaped.

Sitemap Index XML Tag Definitions

The <loc> tag is required and identifies the location of the Sitemap.

The <lastmod> tag is an optional tag that identifies the time that the corresponding Sitemap file was modified. It does not correspond to the time that any of the pages listed in that Sitemap were changed. The value for the lastmod tag should be in W3C Datetime format.

By providing the last modification timestamp, you enable search engine crawlers to retrieve only a subset of the Sitemaps in the index i.e. a crawler could only retrieve Sitemaps that were modified since a certain date. This incremental Sitemap fetching mechanism allows for the rapid discovery of new URLs on very large sites.

The <sitemap> tag encapsulates information about an individual Sitemap.

The <sitemapindex> tag encapsulates information about all of the Sitemaps in the file.Location of Sitemap Files [Contents]

The location of a Sitemap file determines the set of URLs that can be included in that Sitemap. A Sitemap file located at http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.gz can include any URLs starting with http://example.com/catalog/ but can not include URLs starting with http://example.com/images/.

If you have the permission to change http://example.org/path/sitemap.gz, it is safe to assume that you also have permission to provide information for URLs with the prefix http://example.org/path/. Examples of URLs considered valid in http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.gz include:
http://example.com/catalog/show?item=23
http://example.com/catalog/show?item=233&user=3453

URLs not considered valid in http://example.com/catalog/sitemap.gz include:
http://example.com/image/show?item=23
http://example.com/image/show?item=233&user=3453
https://example.com/catalog/page1.html

URLs that are not considered valid are dropped from further consideration. It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server. For example, if your web server is at example.com, then your Sitemap index file would be at http://example.com/sitemap.gz. In certain cases, you may need to produce different Sitemaps for different paths e.g. if security permissions in your organization compartmentalize write access to different directories.Validating your Sitemap

Google uses an XML schema to define the elements and attributes that can appear in your Sitemap file. You can download this schema from the links below:

For Sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd
For Sitemap index files: http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd

There are a number of tools available to help you validate the structure of your Sitemap based on this schema. You can find a list of XML-related tools at each of the following locations:

http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html

In order to validate your Sitemap or Sitemap index file against a schema, the XML file will need additional headers. If you're using the Sitemap Generator, these headers are already included. If you are using a different tool for creating your sitemaps, the header in the XML file should look like the examples below.

Sitemap:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

<url>
...
</url>
</urlset>

Sitemap index file:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd">

<sitemap>
...
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

The available XML tags are described below.<urlset> required Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.
<url> required Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.
<loc> required URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2048 characters.
<lastmod> optional The date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-DD.
<changefreq> optional
How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page. Valid values are:
always
hourly
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly
never

The value "always" should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs.

Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers consider this information when making decisions, they may crawl pages marked "hourly" less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked "yearly" more frequently than that. It is also likely that crawlers will periodically crawl pages marked "never" so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages.
<priority> optional
The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.