Sitemaps: One file, many content types

Sitemaps: One file, many content types: "Webmaster Level: All

Have you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
       xmlns:image='http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1'
       xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
 <url>
   <loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
   <image:image>
      <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
   </image:image>
   <video:video>
   <video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc>   
     <video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title>
   </video:video>
 </url>
</urlset>

Here's an example of what you'll see in Webmaster Tools when a Sitemap containing multiple content types is submitted:



We hope the capability to include multiple content types in one Sitemap simplifies your Sitemap submission. The rest of the Sitemap rules, like 50,000 max URLs in one file and the 10MB uncompressed file size limit, still apply. If you have questions or other feedback, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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