Your Sitemap

Types of URLs you provide

URLs that you provide to Google fall into two general classifications:

  • Canonical URLs—the primary URLs for your content.In most cases, the canonical URL is the is the preferred URL used to access a specific piece of content on a website. For example, if content is available under separate URLs for HTML and AMP HTML, and you prefer HTML version, then you set the URL of the HTML version as the canonical URL. Conversely, if the site is created entirely in AMP HTML with no corresponding HTML content, then the AMP URL should be the canonical URL since there is no other URL. Learn more about Canonical URLs in our Help Center.
  • Alternate URLs—the URLs for alternative content to the primary content resource.Typically, you will specify alternate URLs when you have multiple URL forms for the same content, such as AMP pages or content translated from the original. When these URLs are linked, our systems can more easily consolidate ranking for similar content and serve the right resource to the user, such as an AMP page to a mobile user.

Create an XML sitemap

If you want to provide information updates about your URLs and establish relationships between them and alternate URLs, it might make sense to use an XML sitemap, which can list both canonical and alternate URLs in one file and provide modification dates.

The following example shows a simple XML sitemap with a single page entry that uses both canonical and AMP URLs, and establishes a modification date.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xhtml="https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
  <url>
    <loc>http://example.com/dogs/poodles/poodle1.html</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="amphtml" href="http://example.com/dogs/poodles/poodle1.amp.html"/>
    <lastmod>2016-01-13T18:30:02Z</lastmod>
  </url>
</urlset>