Bing Releases Sitemap Best Practice Guide

Bing released a solid resource on Sitemaps for large Web sites. Here is a summary of the best practices:

• Follow the advice at www.sitemaps.org, which is a resourceful site that offers basic information on how to avoid common mistakes.
• Keep your sitemaps fresh. It is also important for businesses to keep track of their sitemaps on a daily basis in order to identify dead and duplicate links and get rid of them. In fact, you need to create sitemaps at least once daily and make sure there is a sitemap that is linking to the most relevant content on your site.
• Use the correct format. Use an RSS feed in order to list all the new and updated links to fresh content on the site. Then create a list of relevant content or URLs on the site every day, use XML sitemap files.
• Avoid too many XML sitemaps per site and instead create a sitemap index file that lists all the relevant sitemap files and sitemaps index files. You also need to create a single RSS feed, listing the latest content instead of having too many RSS feeds.
• Be sure the sitemap and RSS properties used are appropriate.
• Reference your sitemap files in your robots.txt file and/or within Webmaster Tools.

Bing also announced that you can include an absurd amount of URLs on your sitemap file. However, if for some reason you want to include billions of links, then you need to be sure to use multiple sitemap index files, as well as, link to the most relevant URLs first. To be clear, search engines will not crawl and index trillions of links on a site even if Bing will let you include them in your sitemap. Reducing the links will increase the chances of the most relevant links to content are crawled and indexed by search engines.