Seeing the reports of Admob, a mobile advertising network, it is very evident that the number of people using mobile phones (or touch devices like iPods) to surf the web is growing leaps and bounds every month. In this case, it is so very essential for a webmaster to have his mobile site ready for the next revolution.
While this post doesn’t explain how to create a mobile website, it’ll definitely concentrate on building a Google compliant XML sitemap for your mobile site.
The best place to start is to look at Google’s own mobile sitemap.
XML Mobile sitemap Schema
Similar to the schema of a web sitemap, an XML mobile sitemap to has a schema as follows (broadly concentrating on Google mobile bot)
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0″>
The next set of instructions will be the ‘urlset’ and the ‘loc’ of the webpage, just similar to the web sitemap. The only change in the making of a XML mobile sitemap will be the addition of the line
<mobile:mobile/> to every location
Adding the URL locations
Your site map will now look something like
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.sriraj.org</loc>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
</urlset>
Few touch-up’s to complete
Also it is highly recommended(but not mandatory) to add the ‘priority’, ‘last modified’ and ‘change frequency’ lines to the above sitemap.
So finally your XML mobile sitemap will look like:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:mobile=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-mobile/1.0″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.sriraj.org</loc>
<lastmod>2010-01-03T03:20:38+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.sriraj.org/category/wordpress/</loc>
<lastmod>2010-01-02T03:20:38+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
<mobile:mobile/>
</url>
.
.
.
.
</urlset>
When you’re done save the file as say mobsitemap.xml and upload it to the root folder on your server, and if needed, you could also submit the same to Google using webmaster tools.
If your website has too many pages to do it manually, you may consider a 3rd party mobile sitemap generator to do the work for you
There are many free XML sitemaps for web out there, like this for wordpress powered sites, which you could use for your normal website and add the line <mobile:mobile/> to each URL.
You can look at my mobile sitemap to get a fair idea.
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