Sitemaps: One file, many content types

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Have you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one
Sitemap?
Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can
now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since
Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional
specialized Sitemap formats
have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content.
With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by
supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the
additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here’s an example of a
Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image
search and a video reference to be included in Video search:

Here’s an example of what you’ll see in
Webmaster Tools
when a Sitemap containing multiple content types is submitted:

We hope the capability to include multiple content types in one Sitemap simplifies your Sitemap
submission. The rest of the
Sitemap rules,
like 50,000 max URLs in one file and the 10MB uncompressed file size limit, still apply. If you
have questions or other feedback, please visit the
Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by
Jonathan Simon,
Webmaster Trends Analyst