Sitemaps are files you submit to search engines to provide information about your site. Search engines will use this file to better understand and index the pages and structure of your site, so they can show more accurate search results.
Search engines will generally find and index your site on their own, so sitemaps are not completely necessary, but they can help speed up that process. There are two times in particular when you may want to create a sitemap and submit it to search engines:
- When your site goes live
- When you make significant changes to the structure of your site
Create and submit a sitemap
You can create and submit a site map for each one of your sites. Here's how to do it:
- From the main menu, go to More > Site Management > your site > Overview.
- Under Sitemap, select Create and Submit.
- After selecting this button, we generate a sitemap for your site in the backend and add the link to the robots.txt file. This robots.txt file is updated daily by the OpenCities system. This file is what the search engine will crawl when it is submitted, and upon a regular basis which is at the discretion of the search engine.
We will automatically submit the link for the sitemap to Google and Bing when you create it, and other search engines will naturally encounter and crawl your sitemap. But if you want to manually submit it, Copy the link from the Manually submit to search engines field and submit it to the search engines you need to.
If you make significant changes to your site, you can recreate and submit a new sitemap. Follow the process as above, and under Sitemap, select Recreate and Submit. We'll regenerate a sitemap for your site and update the robots.txt file when the file auto-updates daily at midnight. We'll also resubmit the link to Google and Bing, but keep in mind that it may not be read by search engines straight away.
