XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemap protocol was created by Google and was named Google Sitemap and later accepted by all major search engines and accepted as Sitemaps Protocol. Sitemap protocol defines tag that is used to set importance of the web pages in a website and this lets determine which page is of utmost importance and which is least important. Priority values are: 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, and 1.0. The web pages priority values are relative in a website and in XML sitemap should decrease from 1.0 to 0.1. Pages with high priority are indexed faster compared to pages with low priority. This also helps search engines to decide which url to show if multiple pages from same website rank for search query.

It will be tedious task to manually calculate priority for all web pages of a large website. In that case XML Sitemap Generator helps to calculate priority values.

xml.gz is just GZIP version (i.e. compressed) of your XML sitemaps. Most search engines easily accept GZip compressed XML sitemaps with no problems. We recommend submitting the .gz version because it's smaller. You can online for software that offers the .gz format selection, GSiteCrawler offers.