How to publish your xml sitemap

Once you have created your xml sitemap you will need to publish it to make search engines aware of its existence. This article provides an overview of how to publish your sitemap once you have created it.

There are a number of ways to do this but the quickest and easiest is to upload your sitemap to your website and set the robots.txt file.

The robots file is a set of instructions that tell search engine spiders how to process your website. You can create a reference in your robots file to tell search engines where to find your sitemap.

If you don’t have a robots.txt file it is easy to create one using notepad adding the sitemap reference :

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

You can also submit your sitemap manually to a search engine and we highly recommend you do this and take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster tools

Another way to notify search engines  is to “ping” them to tell search engines your the sitemaps existence and then again when you update it.You can do this using our Free RSS / Sitemap ping tool.