Submitting Your Site Maps to Google and Bing

Submitting Your Sitemap(s) To Google and Bing

Google and Bing Site Maps

The term site map is often confusing because it means different things in different contexts. There is a site map page in the site for users to easily find all the pages in the site. But when speaking in terms of SEO , the term site map usually means google site map. This is the kind of site map that you submit to google and other search engines to help them find and index your content.

You submit your site map(s) to google Webmaster Tools, and Bing Webmaster Center.

Submitting Your Site Maps to Google

Google allows you to submit multiple site maps in WebMaster tools. mojoPortal content management system provides several automatically generated site maps that you can submit to google and other search engines. You should submit the url for main site map which is the site map for all the CMS pages in your site menu:

http://yoursiteroot/SiteMap.ashx

If you are using the Blog feature, it has it's own site map url which you should also submit to google:

http://yoursiteroot/Blog/BlogSiteMap.ashx

The WebStore feature also has a product site map, if you are using that feature you should also submit this site map url:

http://yoursiteroot/WebStore/ProductSiteMap.ashx

As of mojoPortal version 2.3.9.4 there is a new Forum Thread Site Map:

http:yoursiteroot/Forums/ForumSiteMap.ashx

If you have purchased Event Calendar Pro, it also has a site map for events that you can submit to google:

http://yoursiteroot/Events/EventSiteMap.ashx

Note that there is a verification process before Google will accept the site maps for your domain. They will tell you to create an empty file or an html file (with a specific name that they will provide) in the root of your site to prove you own the site.

Submitting Your Site Map to Bing

While google allows you to submit multiple site maps, but Bing Search only allows you to submit one easily. You can overcome this limitation fairly easily by creating an xml file (this is just a text file) named sitemapindex.xml and list all of your site maps in it, then submit just the http://yoursiteroot/sitemapindex.xml to Bing Search. The format for the site map index is shown in this example, it is basically a list of the same site map urls that you submitted to google separately. You can copy and paste this into a text file and name it sitemapindex.xml, modify it to have the coorect site root for your site and put it in the root of your site:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<sitemap>
<loc>http://yoursiteroot/SiteMap.ashx</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://yoursiteroot/Blog/BlogSiteMap.ashx</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://yoursiteroot/WebStore/ProductSiteMap.ashx</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

Then submit this url to Bing:

http://yoursiteroot/sitemapindex.xml

Update: I think Bing now supports submitting multiple site maps so you don't need to create a site map index.

Note that there is a verification process before Bing will accept your site map. They will provide an xml file that you can put in the root of your site to prove you own the site.

Note that in the page settings for any page in the menu you can specify the priority and change frequency of each page and this may also affect how your site is crawled.