Innovative SEO : Learn & Share All About SEO
Hello Friends,
Last few weeks were really challenging for me & was passing throught the ups & downs of life, though it was difficult but enjoyed it too. Google is no more behind in updating its own algorithm for changes & one such update recently they have announced for the webmasters. Yes, today, I would like to share about the changes / updates announced by Google for XML sitemaps.
Google Update : Mixed Media XML Sitemap
Google announced that they’re now accepting mixed-media XML sitemaps. Now, you must be thinking about, what does it mean ? Well, It simply means that, now you can put images, video and regular page URLs all into the same map. I have tried my hands on this when I got notified about this update. According to Google’s post, you have to use all sorts of fancy code to insert images and video into normal XML sitemap. The sample XML sitemap structure will be as shown below,
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/abc.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://www.example.com/image1.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video1.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:title>My first video</video:title>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>
My experiment shows that, after submitting this new sitemap, Google has crawled almost 70% of the images I have listed in the sitemap. Seems its working for my experiment at least 🙂
For many sites like Creative Art, Art Gallery websites, its important to index the images in Search engines & I think, this new sitemap will be a great help for SEO Professionals & Webmasters to quickly index their images into the Google. Anyone out there tried it ? Hows your experience with this new mixed media XML sitemaps ? Please share your views in the comment section to help the community with your experience.