When cataloguing the pages on your site, it would be nice to see the different types of content, such as videos, images, news, mobile URLs and more, all in one place. Now, Google is allowing users to create and submit a single Sitemap with all of this information.
In an official Webmaster Central Blog post Google explains that it understands sites are increasingly using more specialized formats. It wants to streamline the process by which users let Google know about their sites’ content by supporting Sitemaps that can handle multiple content types in one file.
These new Sitemaps won’t be complicated to use, says Google. In fact, they look nearly the same as standard Sitemaps. The submission process will also be similar, except that users can now add different types of content to one file because the updated Sitemaps can handle URLs for various content types.
In addition to making site owners’ lives easier with one simple Sitemap, this new feature should benefit them by making their pages easier for Google to crawl – ultimately delivering faster and more complete site indexing.
