SEO Warrior

Utilizing Other Sitemap Types

Many other Sitemap types exist. These include pure text, news, RSS (and Atom), mobile, and video Sitemaps. We cover all of these types in the following subsections.

Pure Text (URL Listing) Sitemaps

In this format, each URL is listed on a separate line, with up to 50,000 URLs in a single (UTF-8) text file. Here is an example:

http://www.mydomain.com/services.html
http://www.mydomain.com/products.html
...
http://www.mydomain.com/support/downloads.html

This approach is the simplest way to create Sitemaps, especially if you were not going to use any of the optional XML Sitemap attributes. For more information, refer to the Google Webmaster Tools website.

Yahoo! supports the same format. However, the name of the Sitemap file must be urllist.txt (or urllist.txt.gz if compressed). So, if you are using robots.txt as a way to let search engine crawlers know of your text file Sitemap, use this name for all search engines. Otherwise, you will have duplicate Sitemaps for non-Yahoo! search engines.

News Sitemaps

You should use news Sitemaps (another Google XML Sitemap extension) when describing news articles. Articles up to three days old should appear in news Sitemaps. Otherwise, they will be ignored. Here is one article example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://mydomain.com/article012388.html</loc> <news:news> <news:publication_date>2009-01-01T06:06:36-05:00 ...