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October 24, 2005
From time to time, we use this blog to answer some common questions. Here's one:
Do I have to include every URL from my site in my Sitemap? If I don't include some of them, will
they be excluded from the Google index?
Your Sitemap provides us with an additional way to learn about your site. We still use all of our
other methods, such as following links from your site's HTML sitemap and from pages that link to
you. We discover URLs that you don't include in your Sitemap through these regular crawling
processes—it just may take us longer, and we won't have any extra information that you can
provide in a Sitemap (such as priority, last modification date, and change frequency).
We won't exclude URLs that you don't list in your Sitemap from the Google index.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google uses Sitemaps as an additional way to learn about websites, but it's not the only method."],["URLs not included in a Sitemap can still be indexed by Google through crawling links."],["Submitting a Sitemap provides Google with valuable information like priority, last modification date, and change frequency, potentially speeding up indexing."],["Omitting URLs from a Sitemap won't result in their exclusion from Google's index."]]],[]]
