Search Engine Website Submissions - Google Sitemaps

Search engines such as Google discover information about your site by employing software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to gather information about all the pages. The spiders periodically revisit sites to find new or changed content.

If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, you can use a Sitemap file to provide information about the pages on your site. This helps the spiders know what URLs are available on your site and about how often they change.

A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace the normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. A Sitemap simply gives Google additional information that we may not otherwise discover. Sites are never penalized for using this service. This is a beta program, so we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index. Over time, we expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as we refine our processes and better understand webmasters' needs.

Google Sitemaps is a new technique in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct the crawlers, Google hopes to expand their coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to their index.

The Google Sitemaps program is two-way communication between webmasters and Google. Webmasters give Google information about a website so they can index it more effectively, and they can show you how Google sees your site and tell you about any trouble they've had crawling it.

For more details about our other Search Engine Services:

Google's Sitemap Protocol

Google requires a Sitemap to be created based on their Sitemap Protocol in order to submit a sitemap to Google's Sitemap Program. The Sitemap Protocol is an open-source Google-created protocol in XML format. A Sitemap file that uses the Sitemap protocol can contain a list of URLs for your site, along with useful information about those URLs. 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.

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Google encourages the use of Sitemaps that use the Sitemap protocol, both because it enables site owners to provide additional information about site pages beyond just the URLs, and because Google offers this protocol under the terms of the Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons License so that other search engines can make use of it. Google hopes that site owners can create a single Sitemap for all search engines to use.

Please note that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a Sitemap (or Sitemaps) to a search engine, you will help that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.