Drive More Traffic to Your Maps API Site - Include KML Files in Your Sitemap

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Maps API

Your Google Maps API powered site has lots of great content. Including KML files in a sitemap.xml file (see http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html ) is a great way for you to help us index and drive traffic to your site. After publishing your data in KML, we'll crawl the KML files that you specify in your sitemap.xml file. We'll send users your way when they search for content that is found on your mashup site. As an added bonus, once your data is in KML, it will be available for viewing on Google Earth.

Publishing a KML Sitemap involves a few easy steps:

• Identify those features on your maps site which can be displayed as KML features.
• Convert those features into KML equivalents and publish them within one or more KML files.
• Create a sitemap.xml file that identifies links to all of your KML files.
• Place the sitemap.xml in the root directory of your site.

Please see our sitemap documentation ( http://www.google.com/apis/maps/sitemap.html) for more details about including your KML content in a sitemap.