Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Basically, the two steps to participating in Google Sitemaps are:

1. Generate a Sitemap in the correct format using Sitemap Generator.
2. Update your Sitemap when you make changes to your site.

Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If either of the following are true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps:

• You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.
• You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.

Absolutely nothing. Google has never charged for placement in our search results, and we don't have any plans to do so.

In alignment with Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible, this collaborative crawling system will allow our crawlers to optimize the usefulness of Google's index for users by improving its coverage and freshness.

Read 'How do I create a Sitemap' below to learn about the format for Google Sitemaps. We also have detailed documentation on the Sitemap Protocol and the Sitemap Generator if you'd like to skip straight to the technical details.

You don't need an account to generate and submit a Sitemap. However, we encourage you to sign up for an account so that you can track the status of your Sitemaps and view diagnostic information for your submissions. Having an account will not affect your site's ranking within our results. If you already use Gmail, Groups, My Search History, Alerts, or Froogle Shopping List, you already have a Google Account and can sign in with your existing account to use Google Sitemaps.

No. Using Google Sitemaps will not influence your PageRank; there will be no change in how we calculate the ranking of your pages.

The Sitemap Protocol is a dialect of XML for summarizing sitemap information that is relevant to web crawlers. For each URL, you can include crawl "hints" like the last modified date and approximate change frequency. You can read more about the Sitemap Protocol here.

There are a number of methods you can use to create a Sitemap. We are proud to offer  TM Sitemap Generator, downloadable from the same place - it's a simple script that generates Sitemaps for basic use cases. You can read more about the Sitemap Generator below. If the Sitemap Generator will not work for your site structure, we encourage you to write your own script for generating Sitemaps and share it with others.

We don't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.

There are a number of ways to submit your Sitemap for inclusion in Google Sitemaps. The Sitemap Generator script can build and submit your Sitemap automatically. If you don't use the Sitemap Generator, you may also submit your Sitemap through your Google Sitemaps account; or, you may use an HTTP request for submission.

To submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request, issue your request to the following URL:

For example, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz, your URL will become:

URL encode everything after the /ping?q=:

You can issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of your choosing. A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response code; if you receive a different response, you should resubmit your request.

Note: If you are providing a Sitemap index file, you only need to issue one HTTP request that includes the location of the Sitemap index file; you do not need to issue individual requests for each Sitemap listed in the index.

During this beta period, 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.

You can use any reasonably large access log (i.e., an Apache log) to submit your URLs. The Sitemap Generator allows you to generate a Sitemap from a list of URLs, from your access logs, or by pointing to a directory path hosting static files corresponding to URLs.

We also support the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting, a popular protocol in the library world. If your sitemaps are already available in OAI-PMH version 2.0 format, you are welcome to submit these. We also accept RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds, using the link/lastMod fields.

Finally, if you simply want to give us a list of your URLs, read "What is the simplest sitemap I can submit?" below.

We strongly recommend that you use an XML format such as Sitemap or OAI for your sitemaps, since they allow you to associate additional information with each URL. However, we can also accept sitemaps in the form of a text file containing a simple list of URLs. The simple sitemap format consists of a list of URLs with one URL per line. For example:

Notes about this format:

• Your URLs must not include embedded newlines.
• You must fully specify URLs because Google tries to crawl the URLs exactly as you provide them.
• Your sitemap files must use UTF-8 encoding.

Google uses an XML schema to define the elements and attributes that can appear in your Sitemap file. You can download this schema from the links below:

For Sitemaps: http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd
For Sitemap index files: http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/siteindex.xsd

There are a number of tools available to help you validate the structure of your Sitemap based on this schema. You can find a list of XML-related tools at each of the following locations:

http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2000/12/13/schematools.html

In order to validate your Sitemap or Sitemap index file against a schema, the XML file will need additional headers. If you're using the Sitemap Generator, these headers are already included. If you are using a different tool for creating your sitemaps, the header in the XML file should look like the examples below.

Sitemap:

Sitemap index file:

TM Sitemap Generator is a simple Perl script that can be configured to automatically create Sitemaps and submit it into Google.  Sitemap Generator can create these Sitemaps from a directory path hosting static files corresponding to URLs. You can read more about Sitemap Generator here.

Sitemap Generator requires Perl scripts interpretor.

We've placed installation and execution tips for TM Google Sitemap Generator here.

Archived Sitemap Generator source code placed here here.