This page describes how to build a sitemap and make it available to Google. Learn more about sitemaps here.

Build and submit a sitemap:

1. Decide which pages on your site should be crawled by Google, and determine the canonical version of each page. 
2. Decide which sitemap format you want to use. You can create your sitemap manually or choose from a number of third-party tools to generate your sitemap for you.
3. Test your sitemap using the Search Console Sitemaps testing tool.
4. Make your sitemap available to Google by adding it to your robots.txt file or directly submitting it to Search Console.

Sitemap formats

Google supports several sitemap formats, described here. Google expects the standard sitemap protocol in all formats. Google does not currently consume the attribute in sitemaps.

All formats limit a single sitemap to 50MB (uncompressed) and 50,000 URLs. If you have a larger file or more URLs, you will have to break your list into multiple sitemaps. You can optionally create a sitemap index file (a file that points to a list of sitemaps) and submit that single index file to Google. You can submit multiple sitemaps and/or sitemap index files to Google.

 
  
    http://www.example.com/foo.html
    2018-06-04
  

http://www.example.com/file1.html
http://www.example.com/file2.html

Sitemap extensions for additional media types

Google supports extended sitemap syntax for the following media types. Use these extensions to describe video files, images, and other hard-to-parse content on your site to improve indexing.

• Video
• Images
• News

General sitemap guidelines

• Use consistent, fully-qualified URLs. Google will crawl your URLs exactly as listed. For instance, if your site is at https://www.example.com/, don't specify a URL as https://example.com/ (missing www) or ./mypage.html (a relative URL).
• Don't include session IDs from URLs in your sitemap to reduce duplicate crawling of those URLs.
• Tell Google about alternate language versions a URL using hreflang annotations.
• Sitemap files must be UTF-8 encoded, and URLs escaped appropriately.
• Break up large sitemaps into smaller sitemaps to prevent your server from being overloaded if Google requests your sitemap frequently. A sitemap file can't contain more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 50 MB uncompressed. Use a sitemap index file to list all the individual sitemaps and submit this single file to Google rather than submitting individual sitemaps.
• Use recommended canonicalization methods to tell Google if your site is accessible on both the www and non-www versions of your domain. You need to submit a sitemap for only your preferred domain.
• Use sitemap extensions for pointing to additional media types such as video, images, and news.
• If you have different URLs for mobile and desktop versions of a page, we recommend pointing to only one version. However, if you feel the need to point to both URLs,  annotate your URLs to indicate the desktop and mobile versions.
• If you have alternate pages for different languages or regions, you can use hreflang in either a sitemap or html tags to indicate the alternate URLs.
• Non-alphanumeric and non-latin characters. We require your sitemap file to be UTF-8 encoded (you can generally do this when you save the file). As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.  A sitemap can contain only ASCII characters; it can't contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it.

  Character		Escape Code
  Ampersand	&	&
  Single Quote	'	'
  Double Quote	"	"
  Greater Than	>	>
  Less Than	<	<

  In addition, all URLs (including the URL of your sitemap) must be encoded for readability by the web server on which they are located and URL-escaped. However, if you are using any sort of script, tool, or log file to generate your URLs (anything except typing them in by hand), this is usually already done for you. If you submit your sitemap and you receive an error that Google is unable to find some of your URLs, check to make sure that your URLs follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and the XML standard.
  
  Here is an example of a URL that uses a non-ASCII character (ü), as well as a character that requires entity escaping (&):
  http://www.example.com/ümlat.html&q=name
  Here is that same URL, ISO-8859-1 encoded (for hosting on a server that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:
  http://www.example.com/%FCmlat.html&q=name
  Here is that same URL, UTF-8 encoded (for hosting on a server that uses that encoding) and URL escaped:
  http://www.example.com/%C3%BCmlat.html&q=name
  Here is that same URL, entity escaped:
  http://www.example.com/%C3%BCmlat.html&q=name

Make your sitemap available to Google (Submit your sitemap to Google)

There are a few different ways to make your sitemap available to Google:

• Submit it to Google using the Search Console Sitemaps tool
• Insert the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file, specifying the path to your sitemap:
  Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap_location.xml
• Use the "ping" functionality to ask us to crawl your sitemap. Send an HTTP GET request like this:
    http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=<complete_url_of_sitemap>
  for example:
    http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://example.com/sitemap.xml

Troubleshooting sitemaps

See the sitemaps troubleshooting guide.

* Nguồn: Google Search Console