Sitemap submission : Do sitemaps need to be resubmitted when they are updated?

Question

In short: Should I resubmit my sitemap through Google Webmasters Tools every time I replace a sitemap.xml with an existing sitemap.xml (i.e., www.domain.com/sitemap.xml)? Or does it check it automatically?

Detail explanation: Once a week, I add new articles to my website, and each time after uploading new content, I am replacing my existing sitemap.xml with a newly generated sitemap.xml in my website folder.

So, do you think I need to do the same changes (i.e., again submitting the sitemap.xml) to search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, etc...) and in Google Webmaster Tools also?

Yandex Webmaster Tools says this regarding sitemaps:

Please note: there is no need to delete or add another Sitemap file if it has been modified as the Yandex indexing robot regularly checks for changes.

Solution 1

Search engines will crawl your site more frequently if your content changes more often. If you're just adding new URL's, then there's no need to regenerate your sitemap.xml each time.

However, you should update the last modification date in your sitemap by modifying the lastmod attribute, and specify the changefreq for any URL's that will periodically change.

A sample sitemap with these attributes is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

      <lastmod>2013-07-26</lastmod>

      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority>

   </url>

</urlset> 

As seen above, you can also specify the priority attribute for URL's that you deem most important relative to the other URL's in your sitemap, such as new ones.

You can also use the Fetch as Google tool to trigger crawling for a site, and for newly updated URL's too - see: Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Google

Lastly, it's a good idea to test your sitemaps before you submit them to see if there's any issues with them. Here's how: Test Sitemaps & Features In Google Webmaster Tools

Solution 2

Google periodically checks your submitted sitemap.xml file for updates. You only need to submit it once.

See: How often does GWT check dynamic sitemaps?

Solution 3

Interesting article, which suggests (at least at the time of writing) that there may be some benefit in re-submitting, despite Google saying otherwise.

http://www.lauradhamilton.com/resubmitting-your-sitemap-to-google

Comments

[dan]

Sitemap generators might be helpful, but it's probably a good idea to review their results prior to submitting to see if all the URL's you want to submit are listed properly, and test it as covered above.

[Matt Evans]

ah, chuckle. That article references this question.

[尤川豪]

thank you very much! just searched for this information and found your answer. very helpful :)))