XML sitemap latest best practices?

[dublinbet]

If anyone optimised their sitemap recently and would like to share some tips it would be much appreciated:-)

Cheers

[AlanMosley]

I can tell you that Bing is very strict with the sitemap. they accept only a very small margin of error.
They say not to include every page in your site, just the important pages, if a small site them this does not matter.
All dates should be true, no 404’s now 301’s only 200’s
Keep it updated and accurate and you should get plenty of love from Bing.

[dublinbet]

Thanks Alan!

Do you think the top converting pages and the pages i potentially want to rank for should be included at the top of the sitemap?

Cheers

[AlanMosley]

i dont think that matters, but keep it honest, bing makes a lot of noise about losing trust in your sitemap, canonical tags, 301's and the like if they are not used correctly.

Meaning they will not believe the things you do right if you are doing it wrong elsewhere in the site.

[JohnW-UK]

Hi Alan,

Nice answer - I have a large site we are sorting the XML sitemap and is in 3 languages. You say only include the important pages - does this mean Bing will index the other pages if it feels like it - i.e. you cannot force it to index/update?

Also I have have a question about XML sitemaps if you have a moment to have a look - http://moz.com/community/q/xml-sitemaps-how-to-create-the-perfect-xml-sitemap

Cheers

[AlanMosley]

Yes you can not force indexing it is always up to the search engine.

In a small site a sitemap is next to useless really. sitemaps help the search engine find and decide what to crawl. in a small site with all pages linked its going to find them anyhow. in a large site it could be a good thing to show what has changed, where to find new links and maybe pages that are not linked.