Sitemap: How to create your sitemapindex.xml for your robots.txt

Google, others and hopefully soon all other major search engines understand since many months another method of sitemap and RSS feed submission. The robots.txt entry

/sitemapindex.xml

shows where on your site - in my case at root level - the list of all sitemaps and / or RSS feeds are.

The content of the file sitemapindex.xml then contains the full URL to each sitemap you want to be found as well as all RSS feeds you have.

Here a full example of a sitemapindex.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.kriyayoga.com/photography/photo_gallery/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2007-05-05T04:00:00+08:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.kriyayoga.com/rss/love.rss</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-20T12:05:00+08:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.kriyayoga.com/love_blog/modules/mod_rss/rss.php/2.0</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-20T12:05:00+08:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.kriyayoga.com/rss/ph_news.rss</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-20T12:05:00+08:00</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

The dates/times in each entry is when you create that entry or add that particular feed to the file sitemapindex.xml !!!

Minor search engines and most RSS feed directories want to receive a ping after manually registering a feed, major SE search, find and grab the feeds on a regular basis many times a day from your site if and only if you tell them where you have your sitemap and RSS files.

Enjoy and be progressive in your web publishing if success is on your own agenda as well. www is growing hourly and so does the global competition.

Love and bliss

hans