Google Sitemap Index
A simple website such as blog would not require in depth dynamic URL digging. However, a commercial online shopping portal with a number of products, and those products later divided into various categories, and under different categories, there are different models, for example, should need a better sitemap.
A good sigle sitemap as allowed by Google should only contains a maximum of 50k URLs, with maximum size of 10Mb. Better still, divide it into groups of sitemaps for better search engine crawl. That’s where Sitemap Index comes into the place.
I will take Hotels-Everywhere for example, a simple hotel searching portal, but with multiple categories. The structure may looks like this;
Hotels-Everywhere
By Countries
By Cities
By Suburban
Hotel Name 1
Hotel Name 2
.
.
Hotel Name n
There are only 20,000 URLs, still allowed for a single sitemap, but I want to tell Google crawler (bots) how do my site looks like. The bots will not hit the search button, and it will not be interested to dig the page.php?id=x from 1 to 20,000. So without doing anything, Google will never know how important and how many good content that I have. That’s the idea.
1. So I start with Hotels-Everywhere sitemap index, named as sitemap.xml which is accessible at the root folder. It consist of some URLs listing the firs page of my hotels identified by country name.
2. Then I go deeper with the next sitemap index with pages identified by cities.
3. Then by suburbans.
4. Lastly when the bot reach the last sitemap index at #3, those URLs will be sending the bot to a real single file sitemap with a lot of hotels name, precisely with the related country, city & suburban.
I am thinking by this way, I’m helping the bot to understand Hotels-Everywhere and later crawl ALL the content accordingly. Yummy!
