According to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, the users now no longer have to specify the Sitemap file type in order to submit a Sitemap to Google! The search engine will now automatically determine as to what type of data is being submitted… In short – Sitemap submission has now become easier!
Part of what makes the web so interesting is that there are so many different kinds of content out there. Do you use videos on your website? If so, send us a Video Sitemap file so that we can send you visitors to those videos! Do you host source-code samples? Submit a Code Search Sitemap! Here are the various kinds of Sitemap files that Google supports at the moment:
- XML Sitemap files for web pages – Use these files to submit all of your web pages (this is the preferred format for web pages). While not all search engines may support the Sitemap types listed below, the XML Sitemap for web pages is supported by all search engines of sitemaps.org.
- RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds for web pages – Many blogs create these automatically.
- Text files with web page URLs – If you can’t automatically create one of the above formats, you can create a text file with your URLs in it.
- XML Sitemap files for Video Search – Videos on your website can be indexed and made available for Google Video Search.
- Media-RSS feeds for Video Search – mRSS feeds are used by various other systems, we can use these for Google Video Search as well.
- XML Sitemap files for Google Code Search – If you make programming samples or code available to your users, you can submit these for Google Code Search.
- XML Sitemap files for mobile web pages – Using this kind of format allows us to recognize content that has been optimized for mobile devices (please note that there was recently a small change in the format).
- XML Sitemap files for geo-data – If you have geographic data on your website in the form of KML or GeoRSS files, please let us know about these files.
- XML Sitemap files for News – News websites can submit their news content in this special Sitemap format (please note that you must first register with Google News before these files are processed).
