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Google Sitemaps

Learn how to improve your Google Ranking- Submit Your Site to Google Sitemaps Today!

You and every website owner wants to improve their ranking on Google but most people have no idea where to begin. Google Sitemaps is a powerful starting point that helps you ensure that all of your site's pages are successfully crawled by Google search engine bots. Plus, it gives you useful information about your site that can help you develop a strategy to improve your ranking.

Benefits to you:

Submitting to Google Sitemaps gives you automatic submission to Google.
By providing a list of all the webpages on your site, Google can inform and direct their crawlers, speeding up their discovery and addition to their index. This is especially useful for dynamic content or pages, which aren't easily found by crawlers by simply following links.
If a page on your site isn't listed, Google Sitemaps provides the reasons why so you can avoid the same problems in the future.
If you add pages to your site, you can add the new pages to your list on Google Sitemaps to help speed up their discovery by crawlers.
Google Sitemaps also provides you with valuable information and statistics about your site, including what keywords visitors used to find your site, who your referrers are, etc. This will help you to tailor your web marketing strategy.

1. How to Submit Your Google Sitemap

Click on "Manage Pages" -> "Power Tools."

Click on "Add a Google Site Map to Your Site."

You see a list of every page of your site including all the pages in your index, all hidden pages and any subpages (e.g. if you have a catalog page, every product page it links to is listed). You have 3 tasks to do now.

Select which pages you wish to submit to Google Sitemaps.

By default every page is selected for submission to Google Sitemaps. You have the option to now de-select pages if you wish by clicking on the checkmark by the page you do not wish to list. Note that later on you can resubmit your pages and change which ones are selected or not selected.

Indicate how often the page is updated.

Under "Change Frequency," select from the drop down menu which frequency -- always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never -- applies to each page.

Prioritize the importance of the page.

Under "Priority" select 0, 0.1, 0.2,..., 1.0 from the drop down menu. Pages which are the most important (typically your home page is ranked high) should be ranked 1 with less important pages ranked lower. Each page does not have to have a unique priority level. For example, you could have 5 pages with priority level 0.4 if you like. Google will crawl the higher priority pages first.

When you're done, click "Create Google Sitemap."

Important: If you are resubmitting your sitemap to Google Sitemaps, stop here. The other steps are not necessary.

If this is your first time submitting a Sitemap from your site, copy the Sitemap url (highlight and press CTRL-C).

Then, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps and log into your Google Account. If you don't have a Google Account yet, click on "Create a Google Account" and set one up.

After you log into your Google Account, click "add a sitemap now!"

Select "General Web Sitemap," paste in your Sitemap url you copied earlier and click "Add Site."

Next, you will need to verify you are the owner of the site you generated a sitemap for with Google. To do this, click "OK" by "View: All Sites."

Click on "verify" beside your Google Sitemap listing.

On the next page, copy the empty file name minus the ".html." For example, below we copied:

GOOGLEd670c48e077fc649

Just highlight this and press CTRL-C to copy. Next, go back to your site and enter in the file name by ".html" and then click on "Create Google Sitemap.". This will automatically create a hidden page called "Google Site Map Verify" on your site. If you click on "Manage Pages" on your site you can see it has been created.

Now go back to the Google Account page and click "Check Status."

The status changes to VERIFIED.

You're done! From time to time Google will be checking for the "Google Site Map Verify" page. If you accidentally delete it, you can create a new page with the same friendly url extension.

2. How to Resubmit Your Google Sitemap

If you have submitted your Google sitemap earlier, you can resubmit anytime with pages added and/or removed. Just follow steps 1 to 4 of How to Submit Your Google Sitemap. The other steps are not necessary because you already verified you are the owner of the site.

3. Google Sitemaps FAQs

Most questions can be answered by Google here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html. You can also find links there to teach you how to troubleshoot any errors and use the Google Sitemaps statistics to your advantage. If you need help with any technical issues, or if you want to discuss the program in general with other webmasters, please visit the Google Sitemaps Groups page.

Here are some of the more common questions and answers:

Does it cost anything to submit my Google Sitemaps?

No, it's free.

Can I submit multiple Google sitemaps on the same Google Account?

Yes. Log into your Google Account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps and then click on the "Add" tab to add additional sitemaps. You will need to verify you are the owner of each site per the instructions in How to Submit Your Google Sitemap.

Can I delete the page I created to verify my ownership of my site?

Yes, but Google Sitemaps will periodically wish to check for this page so you would have to recreate the page again later. To make things easier for yourself, you can simply hide the page from your index. Click on "Manage Pages" and then click "Hide" by your page.