Google sitemap

I recently decided to find out how to go about submitting an XML sitemap file to Google. It all kicked off when I received an email from DMXZone.com telling me about some of their new extensions. One of them is a free extension called Google Sitemap Generator.

I promptly downloaded the extension and set to work, and here's how things went:

1. Install the Google Sitemap Generator extension.
2. Fire up Dreamweaver and run the extension.
3. Enter your URL in full, e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com
4. Enter your home page, e.g. index.html
5. Click Generate and your done.

I then discovered in a users comment on DMXZone that the header information in the XML file was out of date, showing this info:

xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd"

I did some more digging on the net, and found out this is what the above data should have been:

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"

So I replaced the data, moving onto the next step, which is to submit the sitemap file to Google. But first, I uploaded the file to the root of the website. At the same time, I created a robots.txt file specifying the sitemap file, like this:

Sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

It turns out there are several ways to submit the file, or at least make search engines aware of it. The method I used was to ping it to Google, like this:

http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Google notifies you via the browser that your submission has been successful, and that it will crawl it soon.

Now wait...