Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google

June 14th, 2007 in Tutorials/Helps, Website Tools by Dan

Today we will be continuing on with the series about how to setup Google Sitemaps and how to add the sitemap that you created to your Google account. So first things first, go login to your Google account at www.google.com/sitemaps. This will redirect you to the right page in Google for setting up your sitemap.

Once you’ve logged in you should see a box like the one below where you can add a site to your Google account. Go ahead and type in the basic address of the site that you’re working with into this box and click on “Add Site”. You can type in either just the domain name (www.website.com) or the full URL (http://www.website.com), it doesn’t matter which you do.

Google Sitemaps image 1

Once you’ve entered your site, you’ll be taken into an area called Summary. This page will tell you things like when the Googlebot last visited your site and if you site has been indexed by Google. Our next step is to verify that we are the owner of the site and also submit our sitemap. You should see a link on the page that will take you to the verification page.

Google Sitemaps image 2

To verify your site, you have two different options. Really they just want you to prove that you are the owner of the site before they start giving you any additional information. Personally, I rather like that they make you do this, it makes it harder for my competition to see what I’m up to! Your two options are to either add a special meta tag to your home page or upload a special file to your site. They’ll give you the details. Go through the instructions, find out which one is the best for you, and git’r done!

Once you’ve started the verification process you can also go ahead and submit a sitemap to the program as well. Near the top of the page you’ll see the navigation. You want to click on the button that says “Sitemaps”.

On this next page, right in the middle it will have a link that says “Add a Sitemap”. Click on this link.

Now you’ll be on a page that gives you a drop-down menu to choose the type of sitemap that you will be linking to Google. Choose “Add General Web Sitemap”. Next follow the steps that are listed on the page. We covered the first and second steps in the last post, which was to create the sitemap. Please go back to this step if you missed it. In step 3 you just have to put in the URL where you sitemap is located, so for example “http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml”. Then click on the button that says “Add Web Sitemap” and you’re done! They’ll let you know if there were any errors.

Tomorrow I’ll do part 4 of this series. In part 4 we’ll take a look at what information you can gather from the Google Sitemaps program and how to use it. Then next I’ll have part 5 where I’ll show you how to hack this information and get even more out of it. Should be fun!

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 4 - What You Can Learn From Google Sitemaps Data
Google Sitemaps Series Part 5 - Getting More Information

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