Understanding Sitemaps

This section provides an introduction to search engines' use of sitemaps. For additional information, see the resources listed at the end of this topic.

The following snippet is an example of a sitemap.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1" xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1" xmlns:news="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-news/0.9" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
    <url> 
        <loc>https://www.brightspot.com/brightspot-cms</loc>
        <lastmod>2019-11-25</lastmod>
    </url>
    <url> 
        <video:video>
            <video:thumbnail_loc>https://www.brightspot.com/thumbnails/cms-demo.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
            <video:title>Brightspot CMS moves your business forward</video:title>
            <video:description>Brightspot CMS enables you to create enterprise 
applications at scale and with astonishing speed.</video:description>
            <video:content_loc>https://www.brightspot.com/cms-demo</video:content_loc>
            <video:duration>1209</video:duration>
        </video:video>
    </url>
</urlset>

Search engines may choose to incorporate a sitemap's elements in their results, modify them, or ignore them.

If you publish a high-volume site, you probably add and modify dozens of items every day, and possibly archive older items. Such high volumes can make for enormous sitemaps with unreasonably frequent updates. Brightspot simplifies the management of sitemap updates by using partitions based on content type.

Year-month sitemap partitions

The year-month partitions separate your sitemap items into monthly buckets based on an item’s publication date.

Referring to the previous illustration—

• The parent sitemap is named sitemap.xml. It has 13 entries for year-month sitemaps.
• Each monthly sitemap contains individual sitemap entries.
• The sitemap sitemap-latest.xml contains entries newer than the most recently monthly sitemap.

The year-month partition strategy applies to all content types except articles, blog posts, and press releases.

Single-file sitemap partitions

Some content types have high volume but a short time of interest, such as weather or traffic reports. To ensure the sitemaps for these items remain updated, Brightspot organizes them into two separate files.

Referring to the previous illustration:

• The parent sitemap is named sitemap.xml. It has two entries for subsidiary sitemaps.
• The sitemap news-sitemap-content.xml contains items published in the past two days.
• The sitemap sitemap-latest.xml contains items published in the past six hours.

Brightspot automatically updates sitemaps based on the type of sitemap. Standard and video sitemaps update somewhat frequently over longer periods of time, and news sitemaps update very frequently over shorter periods of time.

See also:

• Sitemaps XML
• Manage your sitemaps