A sitemap, as the name implies, is a map of a website that contains the information indicating the correct path for a crawler to follow (the spiders that search engines use to analyze the different pages of a website) to crawl the site and begin indexing in any search engine.
Sitemaps are the maps that search engine crawler robots use to analyze and sort the content of a website.
Sitemaps organize the information of the different URLs of the website, images, categories and tags, to make it easier for “crawlers”, for example the GoogleBot (Google’s crawler robot) to sort and understand the information that will appear on the search results page (SERP) when a user performs a search. Although these robots can do this work themselves, sitemaps speed up the process.
How to submit a sitemap to Google?
There are several ways to submit a sitemap to Google. The first is through Google Search Console. This is also a simple way to do it, for it is only necessary to access the tool and click on the report “sitemaps”which appears in the left bar.
Next, simply type the final part of the sitemap URL in the text box, as shown in the following image.
Finally, we click on the “submit” button so that Google receives a notification indicating that it can review the sitemap. This process will take a little while, once reviewed, the new Sitemap will appear in the “Submitted Sitemaps” section, next to its status. If shows the word “successful is that there are no errors, otherwise a notification will appear and the sitemap will need to be fixed.
Another way to submit the sitemap to Google is to add it to the robots.txt file so that the crawler robots find the address and check itthus initiating crawling and indexing of the content.
Finally, there is a way to send them, using a browser ping. From the search bar of a browser, simply send a gET request to the address “https://www.google.com/ping?”, providing the full URL of the Sitemap.
An example would be:
“https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://ejemplo.com/sitemap.xml”
In this case, it is a somewhat more complicated system and requires some knowledge, as well as having previously created the sitemap of the website and hosted it on the server.
