Sitemaps XML format

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XML tag definitions
Entity escaping
Using Sitemap index files
Other Sitemap formats
Sitemap file location
Validating your Sitemap
Extending the Sitemaps protocol
Informing search engine crawlers

This document describes the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol.
The Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.
The Sitemap must:

• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
• Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details.
Also, all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com. For further details, refer the Sitemap file location

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.