Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, is a free tool that enables business owners and SEO specialists to monitor the visibility of their website in Google search. It helps identify errors quickly while communicating changes or fixes back to Google.
Best practice calls for creating one sitemap index file containing all of your sitemaps to avoid duplicity and ensure Google crawls all pages on your website.
Submitting to Google
Unless your content management system, such as WordPress or Wix, allows sitemap creation directly, you will need to manually generate an XML sitemap yourself. A popular method is using an SEO plugin specific for your platform (for instance All in One SEO for WordPress).
Once you have created and uploaded an XML sitemap to your website, Google Search Console allows you to add it. The Sitemaps tab in GSC displays a comprehensive list of all of your sitemaps along with their statuses.
Errors may occur in any of your sitemaps. It’s essential that these errors be reported as it can make Google struggle to index pages that don’t include an XML sitemap properly, leading to unpredictable indexing and even disappearing entirely from search engine results pages. If this occurs, an audit should be run in order to locate its cause and correct it quickly.
Submitting to Bing
Launching an effective search engine optimization campaign requires getting your site indexed, which can be accomplished by creating and submitting an XML sitemap to search engines. A sitemap informs search engines of what pages exist and their structures.
Maintaining an up-to-date XML sitemap can ensure that search engines index the latest versions of your web pages, and Semrush tools make this easier than ever.
Bing Webmaster Tools supports XML, RSS, Atom 1.0 sitemaps as well as video sitemaps. In addition, index coverage reports offer a list of all XML/RSS/Atom feeds known to Bing with sample URLs, last crawl date and index status information – this report can be found under Sitemaps tab in Search Console and its results show how many pages have been indexed, those excluded from sitemap and why.
Submitting to Yahoo
Submitting a sitemap is simple and straightforward, serving as a digital version of handing crawlers a map of your website, helping them locate all pages and posts more efficiently and index them accurately.
XML sitemap format is one of the three sitemap formats and supported by most content management systems. It can be used to add additional information about images, video and news content as well as localized pages.
Note that submitting a sitemap doesn’t guarantee its appearance in search engine results; even with an updated and fully-indexed sitemap, search engines ultimately determine when and how often to crawl and update web pages.
A great way to verify if Google has indexed your pages is using either GSC’s Sitemaps tool or Bing Webmaster Tools and verifying them – these steps will also allow you to monitor the indexing status of all of your website pages, making sure they get included as soon as possible.The site https://zorzdans.com/ allows you to gather information about Webmaster Tools quickly.
Submitting to Other Search Engines
Submitting an XML sitemap through Google Search Console is often the best way for websites to ensure Google indexes their pages quickly and thoroughly, taking into account any updates to pages as part of its indexing process. Doing this ensures the most up-to-date versions are included during indexing.
For websites with more than several dozen URLs, it is advised to use an XML sitemap generator to produce a file suitable for submission. Smaller sites may be capable of manually creating an XML sitemap using text editors like Notepad (Windows) or Nano (Linux).
Avoid including duplicate pages in your XML sitemap as this could incur duplicate content penalties. Furthermore, avoid pages returning a 4xx or 3xx status code or those marked “non-canonical” with a canonical tag in your sitemap file and remove URLs which haven’t been updated recently from it.
