Types of Sitemaps
– Sitemap of links from the English Wikipedia’s Main Page
– Sitemap of Google in 2006
– User-visible sitemaps for hierarchical site navigation
– Alphabetically organized sitemaps (site indexes)
– XML Sitemap for search engines and crawlers
XML Sitemaps
– Sitemaps protocol introduced by Google
– Sitemaps allow web crawlers to find dynamic pages
– Bing, Google, Yahoo, and Ask support the Sitemaps protocol
– Sitemaps help search engines have updated page information
– Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled or indexed
Sample XML Sitemap
– Example of a validated XML sitemap for a three-page website
– Sitemaps are useful for non-HTML languages
– Includes URLs, last modification date, change frequency, and priority
Related Concepts
– Biositemap protocol for computational biology resources
– Contact page
– Home page
– Index (search engine)
– Link page
– Search engine optimization
– Web indexing
References and External Links
– Sitemap Usability by Jakob Nielsen
– Article on sitemaps by Tessa Nadik
– Joint announcement from Google, Yahoo, and Bing supporting Sitemaps
– Google Webmaster Tools for uploading sitemaps
– Oreilly article on standardization against Google Sitemap Protocol
– Official website for XML sitemap format
– Sitemap generators at Curlie
– Internet portal
– Wikipedia page on site map
A sitemap is a list of pages of a web site within a domain.
There are three primary kinds of sitemap:
- Sitemaps used during the planning of a website by its designers
- Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site
- Structured listings intended for web crawlers such as search engines