Understanding sitemaps
This section provides an introduction to search engines' use of sitemaps. For additional information, see the resources listed at the end of this topic.
How search engines use a sitemap
The following snippet is an example of a sitemap.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1" xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1" xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url> 1
<loc>https://www.cookies.com/winning-recipes</loc>
<lastmod>2019-11-25</lastmod>
</url>
<url> 2
<video:video>
<video:thumbnail_loc>https://www.cookies.com/thumbnails/soft-chewy.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Best way to remove soft and chewy cookies from the oven</video:title>
<video:description>Kitchen-tested techniques for removing a batch of soft and chewy cookies from the oven</video:description>
<video:content_loc>https://www.cookies.com/soft-chewy</video:content_loc>
<video:duration>1209</video:duration>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
Indicates there is a published item with URL | |
Indicates there is a video published at
|
Search engines may choose to incorporate a sitemap's elements in their results, modify them, or ignore them.
Organization of sitemaps
If you publish a high-volume site, you probably add and modify dozens of items every day, and possibly archive older items. Such high volumes can make for enormous sitemaps with unreasonably frequent updates. Brightspot simplifies the management of sitemap updates by using partitions based on content type.
Year-month sitemap partitions
The year-month partitions separate your sitemap items into monthly buckets based on an item's publication date.
Referring to the previous illustration—
The parent sitemap is named
sitemap.xml. It has 13 entries for year-month sitemaps.Each monthly sitemap contains individual sitemap entries.
The sitemap
sitemap-latest.xmlcontains entries newer than the most recently monthly sitemap.
The year-month partition strategy applies to all content types except articles, blog posts, and press releases.
For details about how often Brightspot updates these sitemap files, see Sitemap update frequencies.
Single-file sitemap partitions
Some content types have high volume but a short time of interest, such as weather or traffic reports. To ensure the sitemaps for these items remain updated, Brightspot organizes them into two separate files.
Referring to the previous illustration:
The parent sitemap is named
sitemap.xml. It has two entries for subsidiary sitemaps.The sitemap
news-sitemap-content.xmlcontains items published in the past two days.The sitemap
sitemap-latest.xmlcontains items published in the past six hours.
For details about how often Brightspot updates these files, see Sitemap update frequencies.
Sitemap update frequencies
Brightspot automatically updates sitemaps based on the type of sitemap. Standard and video sitemaps update somewhat frequently over longer periods of time, and news sitemaps update very frequently over shorter periods of time.
Sitemap Types | Video, Standard | News |
|---|---|---|
Content types included in sitemap | Author, blog, homepage, package, page, section, tag, video | Article, blog post, press release |
Partition strategy | Year-Month (see Year-month sitemap partitions) | Single (see Single-file sitemap partitions) |
Update frequency |
|
|
Time since item publication after which Brightspot does not update sitemaps. | 20 years | 2 days |