Google Sitemap New Features - One File, Many Content Types.

Sitemaps: one file, many content types:

Google has introduced an astonishing feature that we can now submit various content types like image, video, mobile url, code, geo, etc. of our site in a single sitemap file because  now Google supports such  sitemap with different content types.

Google webmaster trends analyst “Jonathan Simon” has explained that the site owners are leveraging sitemaps as they wanted Google to know about their sites. As we know sitemaps are introduced first in 2005, from that time onwards additional specialized sitemap format was introduced for better accommodation of video, images, mobile or geographic content. As number of specialized formats is increasing, it is much easier for sitemap which supports the inclusion of multiple content types in the single sitemap file.

The sitemap structure with multiple content types is said to be similar as standard sitemap which supports additional ability referencing the urls of different content types. The following example shows the sitemap that which refers to standard webpage for web search, image reference for image search, 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>

 Here we can see it in webmaster tools how the multiple content types are submitted:

Let’s hope that the inclusion of multiple content types in a single sitemap simplifies sitemap submission. The other sitemap rules, like submission of maximum 50,000 urls in single file and file size limit of 10 MB uncompressed is still applied.