Everyone wants to get more traffic, especially from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other available top search engines. And there are simple approaches to follow for this wise to be actualized.
Although all search engines still come to crawl and index your contents even without you submitting your site on Google or other search engines.
But there’s no point leaving any store unturned when there are opportunities to do so.
This page will show steps to submit site sitemaps on Google Webmaster tool.
But before then, you need to understand what sitemap really means and what impact it plays on your websites.
What is Sitemap?
A sitemap is a special type of file that provide information about of the pages, videos, image, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them.
It is for the use of search engines and other crawlers, there is a structured format, the XML Sitemap, which lists the contents in a site, and how often they are updated. This is pointed to from the robots.txt file and is typically called sitemap.xml
How to Check If Your Website Has a robots.txt file
This is one important thing you must do. To make sure that you arenot blocking search engines and other crawlers from coming to fetch information on your site.
It is not automatically added, you have to add it yourself.
to check this, simply enter your website address in the browser and end it with the forward slash and robots.txt at the end.
For example: to check mine is; emyshub.com/robots.txt
You can create a file using the information below. Make sure to save the file as “robots.txt” and upload to the root server of your site file.
This will be perfect if you’re using WordPress site.
User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Sitemap: https://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml Sitemap: https://www.YourSite.com/sitemap.xml.gzPlease remember to change/replace the “Yoursite” with your site name before uploading.
Examples of Sitemaps
I personally use two versions. Although there are several of it, but the one listed below covers the rest of them all.
- sitemap.xml
- sitemap.xml.gz
Other sitemap structures includes;
- sitemap-tax-category.xml – listing all categories on the site
- sitemap-tax-post_tag.xml – This sitemap list your keyword tags (keyword phrase).
- sitemap-archives.xml – This sitemap list your archives. Archives are months activities was carried out in your website/blog.
How to Check If Your Website Has a robots.txt file
Importance of Sitemap Submission
Since Sitemap is the language search engines understands, it is very important to get it submitted on any webmaster tool platform that allows and demands for it, like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster tool and Yandex webmaster tool as well.
According to google (here), it made it clear on its blog that “A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.“
once you have submitted the sitemap of your website(s) or blog(s) – you may not need any further actions submitting contents every time you you update your website/blog.
How to Submit Sitemap on Google Webmaster Tool
Step 1: Log in to your Google Webmaster Tool account. You can read about the login steps here.
Step 2: Then click on the arrow-down button to select the site or site version you want to setup sitemap for.
Click on the “Sitemaps” menu to open the sitemap submission page.
Then enter “sitemap.xml” in the box. The sitemap.xml is a default sitemap structure for every websites and blogs
then click the “SUBMIT” button to complete the process.
You should see a notification that the sitemap is submitting. Once its completed without error you should also see a notification that it was submitted successfully.
Click on “GOT IT” to close the pop-up notification.
Also you should see the submission status as “Success”.
Now, start submitting your website contents or you can just relax and wait for Google to come at its assigned time to come crawl your new updates for possible indexing.
Click here to learn how to submit your website contents/post/articles/pages on Google webmaster tool.
How to Delete Sitemaps on Google Webmaster Tool
You may have mistakenly entered a wrong sitemap structure and you want to delete it. Though it won’t cause any harm to your business even if its not deleted.
the steps below shows you how to delete sitemap stuructures on Google webmster tool.
Step 1: Navigate to “Sitemap Menu” tab by the left side of the page.
Clicking on Sitemap (the same way when you wanted to add sitemaps) will open the sitemap area.
Step 2: Click on the particular Sitemap You want to delete.
Step 3: The single page for that sitemap opens up for you to take your next action .
Step 4: Look at the top right side of the page (it is marked RED on the image below), you should see a THREE-dots line – click on it. Then there should be a drop-down named “Delete Sitemap”, also click on that to delete the sitemap from your sitemap list.
Then a pop-up asking you whether you really want to delete the sitemap. Click on “Remove” to confirm your action.
Its, done!
That’s just the way of deleting sitemaps on Google Search Console also known as Google webmaster tool.
Are there other difficulies you face on Google webmaster tool or other Webmaster tool such as Bing and Yandex webmaster tool?
Please do share them on the comment box below.
I will try my best to attend to your comments fast.
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