According to Google the number of sites submitting their sitemaps has increased massively over the last 12 months. Although using sitemaps wont guarantee that every page of your website will be crawled and indexed it definitely helps the search engines to find and index updated content faster. Due to the increase in submissions we have already seen Google recently update its Webmaster tools and they have now too updated some of their sitemap features, seeing the following changes come into place:-
-The amount of child sitemaps for sitemap index files supported by Google and the other search engines that are part of Sitemaps.org has increased from 1,000 to 50,000 which will allow large sites to submit up to 2.5 billion URL’s with the one sitemap.
-The amount of URL’s indexed, shown in the new Google Webmaster tools, is now a lot more accurate.
-They’ve also updated the XSD schemas to allow sitemap extensions which will allow Webmasters to verify more features meaning you can feel a lot more confident that your sitemaps are correct.
-The best update being that sitemap file processing is now a lot quicker as the average time taken from submitting a sitemap to processing it has reduced considerably.
Rumour is there’s more changes on the way so watch this space!
