Submit Your Sitemap to Search Engines

Note: You must Enable your sitemap before you submit it to search engines.

To submit your sitemap, you can use either form-based submission or robots.txt:

  • Use a form
    --OR--
  • Use robots.txt

You need to complete only one of these options.

Provide the sitemap in a form

Some search engines require that you complete a form, while others accept the URL of your website’s sitemap file in the submission string itself. For search engines that accept submission via HTTP, you must URL-encode the location of your website’s Sitemap file. For example:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?sitemap= http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yourwebsite.org%2Fsitemap-index.xml

  1. Locate the submission tool for the search engine:
    2. Search Engine Submission Form
    Bing http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/
    Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
    Yahoo https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
  2. Follow the instructions for each search engine to submit your file location.

Provide the sitemap in the robots.txt file

Most search engine crawlers examine a website’s robots.txt file for information on which files or directories to include or exclude in their search.

  1. Locate your website's robots.txt file. If your website does not have a robots.txt file, create one. Make sure the file on your computer is named robots.txt, and then upload the file to your website’s root folder.
  2. Add a line like the following to your website’s robots.txt file:
    Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsite.org/sitemap-index.xml
  3. Save the file.