We all know creating sitemaps is an essential part of any webmasters jobs these days but as time goes on they become more and more important. Aside from just supporting them Google made a series of changes last week (here’s their post) to give you even more reason to use them.

The most important update is that Google now support a much bigger sitemap than before, the previous 1,000 child limit has been raised to 50,000. That means size is no longer an excuse for not submitting!

A few smaller updates have rolled out including more accurate URL counting, additional support for XSD schemas and increased speed on sitemap processing. Hopefully this is going to be useful since I have genuinely waited days for Google to even notice my sitemap before.

Wondering how to create a sitemap on your site? Well it’s pretty easily actually you get some software to do it!

My recommended choice is the script available at XML-Sitemaps. It works well, is easy to install and well worth the low asking price. If you have a small site you don’t have to pay anything at all as they have a free tool for sites less than 500 pages.

Not hooked on web based apps? The GSiteCrawler is available for free and does a pretty good job of making sitemaps too.

Once you have followed the instructions for your chosen software all you need to do is upload the file and submit inside Google WMT/Yahoo/Bing and easy peasy all 3 major players have your sitemap ready to crawl. If you don’t already have them here are the places to submit sitemaps to;

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bing