Multiple Content Types in a Single XML File

XML sitemaps are usually used to inform Google about your sites content so that they can index them easily. XMl sitemaps can be used for different file formats that are available on a website. Till now we used to create separate sitemaps for different file formats. The ever increasing specialized  formats prompted us to create more multiple sitemaps to accommodate these multiple file formats.

Google has recently introduced the inclusion of multiple content types  in a single sitemap and has announced about this on Google Webmaster Central official blog. With its new sitemap update Google has made it easier to accommodate different file formats in a single sitemap file. The new sitemap format allows formats such as video, images, mobile, code, geographic content etc to be submitted in a single sitemap.

The structure of the new sitemap is similar to the standard sitemap except for the ability to accommodate URLs referencing multiple file formats. I am providing an example for the new sitemap format which I got from the offical blog post. The example shows you the new sitemap format containing reference for Web search of standard web page, image content for Image search and a video reference for video search.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:image=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″
xmlns:video=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:title>Grilling tofu for summer</video:title>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

The below image shows what you see in your webmaster tools, when you submit the new sitemap format.

As per Google the rest of the sitemap rules like 50,000 maximum URLs in one page and the 10 MB uncompressed  file size limit remains intact.