Outline and examples on building an XML Pointer file for your site. How to make sure your sitemaps and indexation is being monitored.

1. XML Sitemap Pointer Files for SEO
You want me to point what, where?

2. What is an XML Sitemap Pointer File?
• Google recommends not having more than 50,000 URLs or keeping the file size less than 10 MB. If a sitemap exceeds this
limit, it is important to split the large file into multiple files and create a sitemap index file that lists all the sitemap files on
your site. We will only need to submit the sitemap index file to the search engines.
The use case for Epicor is designed so we have better visibility into how and when Google & other search engines are
crawling country specific content on the Epicor site. The pointer file provides a clear directive on where each of these
individual sitemaps reside on the site.
XML Sitemaps are only there to help search engines discover URLs for your website. It is not guaranteed that all the URLs
submitted using an XML Sitemap will be crawled and indexed.

3. A Pointer File Is A Road Map For A Search Engine Bot
Always reference US/Corporate content
http://www.epicor.com/Pages/sitemap.xml
Pointer File should live at root:
US XML
www.epicor.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemap
AU XML Pointer UK XML
Sitemap file Sitemap
Always place country specific sitemaps as high as
possible to the country specific homepage:
Example: CN XML
www.Epicor.com/[country]/sitemap.xml Sitemap
www.Epicor.com/uk/sitemap.xml

4. Sample XML Pointer File
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.epicor.com/Pages/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2013-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.epicor.com/uk/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2013-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.3</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.epicor.com/au/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2013-12-23</lastmod>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.epicor.com/fr/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2013-12-23T18:00:15+00:00</lastmod>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.epicor.com/cn/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-23</lastmod>
<priority>1.0</priority>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>

5. XML Tag Definitions
Attribute Required? Description
<urlset> required Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.
<url> required Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.
<loc> required URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2,048
characters.
<lastmod> optional The date of last modification of the file. This date should be in W3C Datetime format. This format allows you to omit the time portion, if desired, and use YYYY-MM-
DD.Note that this tag is separate from the If-Modified-Since (304) header the server can return, and search engines may use the information from both sources
differently.
<changefreq> optional How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the
page. Valid values are:
•always
•hourly
•daily
•weekly
•monthly
•yearly
•never
The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.
Please note that the value of this tag is considered a hint and not a command. Even though search engine crawlers may consider this information when making
decisions, they may crawl pages marked “hourly” less frequently than that, and they may crawl pages marked “yearly” more frequently than that. Crawlers may
periodically crawl pages marked “never” so that they can handle unexpected changes to those pages.
<priority> optional The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on
other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.The default priority of a page is 0.5.Please note that the
priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine’s result pages. Search engines may use this information when
selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.Also, please
note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your
site.

6. Include sitemap location in robots.txt
• Google is not the only search engine out there. For Google and Bing, XML Sitemaps can be easily submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and
Bing Webmaster Tools but for all other search engines, the only way to figure out the location of your XML Sitemap is through the robots.txt file
Example below:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.epicor.com/sitemap.xml location of pointer file
Sitemap: http://www.epicor.com/uk/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.epicor.com/Pages/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.epicor.com/cn/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.epicor.com/au/sitemap.xml all other country specific
sitemaps
LIST ALL SITEMAP LOCATIONS IN ROBOTS.TXT