Site Map
What is a sitemap?
By providing a formatted XML file with a sitemap on our web server, we allow search engine crawlers (like Google) to know which pages are present and which have recently changed and to crawl our site accordingly.
A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the URLs and data under each section.
Previously, sitemaps were primarily intended for website users.
However, Google's XML format was designed with search engines in mind, allowing them to find data more quickly and efficiently.
Search Engine Giants Embrace XML
If you own or manage a website or plan to own one, wouldn’t it be great if you had repeat visitors who were satisfied with getting exactly the information they needed on your page?
In 2005, the Google search engine released Sitemap 0.84, which was designed to use XML.
A sitemap is a way to organize a website, identifying URLs and data under each section. Previously, sitemaps were primarily intended for website users. However, Google’s XML format was designed with search engines in mind, allowing them to find data more quickly and efficiently.
Google’s new Sitemap protocol was developed in response to the growing size and complexity of websites. Business websites often contained hundreds of products in their catalogues, while the popularity of blogs led webmasters to update their content at least once a day, not to mention popular community-building tools like forums and message boards. As websites grew larger, it became difficult for search engines to keep up with all of this content, sometimes “skipping” information as they crawled these rapidly changing pages.
With XML, search engines can track URLs more efficiently, optimizing their search by providing all the information on a single page. XML also summarizes how often a particular website is updated and records the last time changes were proposed.
XML sitemaps are not, as some people think, a search engine optimization tool. They do not impact ranking, but they do allow search engines to perform more accurate rankings and searches. They do this by providing the data a search engine needs and aggregating it in one place, which is very convenient, given that there are millions of websites to crawl.
To encourage other search engines to adopt XML, Google released it under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike licence. Their efforts have paid off. Recently, Google happily announced that Yahoo and Microsoft had agreed to "support" XML, which has now been updated to Sitemap 0.9, and has sponsored www.sitemaps.org, a site designed to explain the protocol. This is good news for website owners and a sign of commendable cooperation between known competitors.
The common recognition of XML means that website developers no longer need to create different types of sitemaps for different search engines. They can create one file to submit, and then update it when they have made changes to the site. This simplifies the entire process of developing and expanding a website.
With this development, XML format will soon become a standard feature of creating and developing all websites. Webmasters themselves have begun to see the benefits that this file offers. Search engines rank a page based on the relevance of its content to particular keywords, but before the arrival of XML format, there were cases where this content was not properly taken into account. It was often frustrating for webmasters to realize that their efforts in creating a website were not taken into account. Blogs, additional pages or even adding multimedia files took hours to create. Thanks to XML file, these hours will not be wasted and will be seen by the three major search engines: Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
To create your XML sitemap and keep search engines informed of changes made to your site, try our free online sitemap generator. In addition to an XML sitemap, our free sitemap generator will also create an HTML sitemap that you can use for your visitors.
XML-Sitemaps.com 18/04/07