sitemap

[ranilyn]

What's the importance of sitemap? How does it work?

[plgffl]

Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines.

While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.

[urminenow]

A hierarchical visual model of the pages of a Web site. Site maps help users navigate through a Web site that has more than one page by showing the user a diagram of the entire site's contents. Similar to a book's table of contents, the site map makes it easier for a user to find information on a site without having to navigate through the site's many pages. Also, in SEO, a site map can make it easier for a search engine spider to find all a site's pages.

[SprintSero]

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site.

Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.

[SprintSero]

Originally Posted by jamesj

there are two sitemap
1) html sitemap
2) xml sitemap

In which html sitemap will be helpful to your website visitors to find a list of page and select the page they looking for where as xml sitemap will help search engine crawlers to find the pages which are not visible for them in simple crawling or links hidden by iframe, ajax, flash etc.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary.

The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly).

In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.