Including site pages in a Sitemap

10/24/2005 03:09:00 PM

Posted by Vanessa Fox

From time to time, we use this blog to answer some common questions. Here's one:

Do I have to include every URL from my site in my Sitemap? If I don't include some of them, will they be excluded from the Google index?

Your Sitemap provides us with an additional way to learn about your site. We still use all of our other methods, such as following links from your site's HTML sitemap and from pages that link to you. We discover URLs that you don't include in your Sitemap through these regular crawling processes --it just may take us longer, and we won't have any extra information that you can provide in a Sitemap (such as priority, last modification date, and change frequency).

We won't exclude URLs that you don't list in your Sitemap from the Google index.