Question

I’m reading up on the Sitemaps.org protocol(http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html) so I can create my own. However one question comes to mind: How do I deal with subpages like, for example, http://www.example.com/page/subpage?

Can i just use it as a ‘toplevel’ <url> tag or do I make a <url> in a <url> tag? or do I use a <urlset> for each toplevel page?

And with that, can i put a *.php file who converts to a XML file in my robots.txt for Google to find. Or am I obligated to use a *.xml file?

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

No, don’t nest url in url.

Each URL gets its own url element. They are all direct childrens of the urlset element.

Bots don’t necessarily assume (or understand) a “hierarchy” (/page/subpage/subsub/…) in URLs. They use it as a unique string; it doesn’t matter to them if your page about soup recipes is at /recipes/soups or at /soups or at /what-i-like (of course, there are other reasons/use-cases why hierarchical URLs might be a good idea).

And with that, can i put a *.php file who converts to a XML file in my robots.txt for Google to find. Or am I obligated to use a *.xml file?

It doesn’t matter how you create the XML file, it only matters if it gets delivered as XML (e.g. with Content-type application/xml). The extension (.xml, .php, …, none at all) shouldn’t matter.

Note that you can also use RSS 2.0, Atom, or even plain text to create your sitemap.