Submitting your Sitemap to Google

Submitting your sitemap to Google

A couple of years ago, Google and Yahoo insisted that website owners produce an automated Sitemap - this is just a complete list of all the pages on your website. The reason was to make it easy for the Search Engine spiders/robots to find every page on a website. An automated sitemap will automatically add a new page you have added to your website to the Sitemap, making it easier for the Search Engines to find and index the new page.

One of the most common omissions by new website owners is to fail to submit their sitemap to Google. Many website designers (usually the graphic designer, non-commercial types) will tell you this is not necessary - Google will find you eventually. That may be true - but how much business will you have lost in those months?
The process is not overly complicated but is worthwhile. After submitting my Sitemap and URL to Google, this website was indexed in 2 days. So tell your graphic designer you want an automated Sitemap and go through the process below:

1. Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

2. Sign in to Google Sitemaps with your Google Account details.
(If you are not using Gmail or other Google Account service, Create a Google Account by selecting the “Create a Google Account” link and follow the directions)

3. Click the Continue button underneath Add a Sitemap - Get started with Google Sitemaps
You will now see the site overview. Select the Add tab at the top of the page
add_button.jpg
4. Under What type of Sitemap would you like to add?, select the General Web Sitemap option. Then click the Next button
General_Web_Sitemap_option.jpg
5. In the field labeled Enter your Sitemap URL below: Enter the address of your dynamic Sitemap from your website, This page is a automatically generated by the Zeald.com website manager software and updated every time you make a change on the website.
This address should read http://www.[my domain name]/sitemap.xml for example. http://www.meatcuisine.co.nz/sitemap.xml
Then click OK
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6. Verify you are the website owner - Next you need to verify that you are the website owner. Google provide you with a Verification file which is a link that Google require you to setup on your website, so proving that you have the authority to make changes to the content of your website.
The easiest way to do this using your Zeald.com website manager is by creating a Redirect. A redirect of the address file provided by Googe to any page within your website.
verification_file_name.jpg

Login to the administration of your website and copy the Verification file name from your Google sitemap account.
If you have a zeald.com website, you can find the detailed instructions on how to do this in the Help Centre.
If you have a website from another supplier, you will have to ask them how to do it on your site.
If you are not sure about some of the terms used in this article, check them out in the Internet Glossary

About Google Sitemaps
Go to Google Sitemaps



It makes total sense to push new links to users quickly. We don't want to wait on the engine to deliver results - we want to get content into the engine faster. Whenever it's possible, we opt to push content rather than have it pulled. That gives us a more interactive experience with Google."

— Marshall Simmonds
Vice President Enterprise Search Marketing of The New York Times Company



The practical benefit to our clients is that we are now providing every opportunity for their sites to be indexed further by Google... This move increases opportunities for our hard to index content such as dynamic applications within the CMS. We're committed to ensuring our clients are able to benefit from changes in the ever more important search landscape."

— Michael L. Waltman
President & CEO of Interactive Sites

An article by Google on Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is an easy way to tell Google about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results.
Google Sitemaps also answers questions you might have about how Google sees your site. For example, you can learn about errors (such as if we're having trouble crawling your pages) and statistics (such as and what search queries return your site in the results).
How Google discovers page and how you can take control
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.

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index.
Submit a Sitemap file to tell us about all the pages on your site, which pages are most important, and how often they change. A Sitemap file doesn't replace our normal methods of crawling the web, it simply gives additional information.

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.

If you have a site that serves content for mobile devices, you can create and submit a Mobile Sitemap to provide information to Google for our mobile web index.
Find out how Google sees your site
Verify that you own the site, and we'll show you statistics and errors about it and the pages in it that we've crawled. This information includes:
• Crawl errors: we list the URLs we had trouble crawling and why we couldn't crawl them.
• Search queries that return your site in the results: we list both the top queries that returned results from your site, as well as the top queries that directed traffic to your site.
• What we know about your site: we list the top content of your site and the words other sites use to link to your site
• Indexing information: we tell you if your site is indexed, show you which pages are in the index, when Googlebot last visited your site, and if we can't crawl your home page
• Information about violations of the webmaster guidelines: if we find violations in your site, we give you the opportunity to fix the problem and request reinclusions.
• robots.txt validation: we tell you if we have trouble parsing your We also let you test drive changes to the file before you change it on your server.
You can see statistics and errors about your site even if you don't have a Sitemap. You can simply add your site to your account and verify ownership of it.
Get started today -- it's free and easy
Simply log in with your Google Account and add your site URL to get started. It's an easy and free way to have a conversation with Google about your site.
To add a site to your account:
1. Add your site to your Google Sitemaps account.
2. Verify your site ownership.
To submit a Sitemap for a site:
1. Create a Sitemap in a supported format.
2. Add your site to your Google Sitemaps account.
3. Add the Sitemap to your Google Sitemaps account.
4. Update your Sitemap when your site changes.
Any site owner can participate in the Google Sitemaps program – from those with a single page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. You may be especially interested in using Google Sitemaps if you want Google to crawl more of the pages on your site and if you want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes. Use of the Google Sitemaps program is absolutely free. Google has never charged for placement in our search results and we have no plans to do so. Sites are never penalized for using this service.
Google has launched this program to support our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. We hope this collaborative crawling system will allow our crawlers to optimize the usefulness of Google's index for users by improving its coverage and freshness.