This post is roughly 15 years old; originally published on January 18, 2009! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
I finally got around to verifying my websites with the Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live search engines. I’ve also setup sitemaps for my websites too. I’ve done this for the websites at work but couldn’t be arsed to do it for my own sites until today.
To find out why you want sitemap enable your sites read the Sitemap page at Wikipedia. In order to register your sitemaps with the major search engines you’ll need to setup accounts for Google Webmaster Tools, MSN Live Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
You’ll then need to verify your site(s) with each of the search engines, they
provide details about how to do this but it typically requires that you put a
meta tag in your page header. Once you’ve verified your site(s) it’s time to
create a sitemap.xml
.
If you have a Wordpress blog adding sitemap support is easy, just use the
Google XML Sitemaps
plugin. This re-builds sitemap.xml
when you update posts, pages, comments etc.
It also notifies all the relevant search engines that content has changed on
your site. Very useful indeed. If you need to create your sitemap by hand, or
better yet script its creation, then read sitemaps.org
for the protocol spec.