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.

Types of sitemaps

A sitemap of what links from the English Wikipedia's Main Page.

Sitemap of Google in 2006

Sitemaps may be addressed to users or to software.

Many sites have user-visible sitemaps which present a systematic view, typically hierarchical, of the site. These are intended to help visitors find specific pages, and can also be used by crawlers. They also act as a navigation aid by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance. Alphabetically organized sitemaps, sometimes called site indexes, are a different approach.

For use by search engines and other crawlers, there is a structured format, the XML Sitemap, which lists the pages in a site, their relative importance, and how often they are updated. This is pointed to from the robots.txt file and is typically called sitemap.xml. The structured format is particularly important for websites which include pages that are not accessible through links from other pages, but only through the site's search tools or by dynamic construction of URLs in JavaScript or Adobe Flash.

XML sitemaps

Main article: Sitemaps

Google introduced the Sitemaps protocol so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries. The Sitemap files contains URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them. Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

Since the major search engines use the same protocol, having a Sitemap lets them have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. Google Webmaster Tools allow a website owner to upload a sitemap that Google will crawl, or they can accomplish the same thing with the robots.txt file.

XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" by filling out a form on the search engine's submission page. Now, web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it. Regularly, submitting an updated sitemap when new pages are published may allow search engines to find and index those pages more quickly than it would by finding the pages on its own.

Benefits of XML sitemaps to search-optimize Flash sites

HTML5 is a widely used and popular web technology that has many advantages over Flash. One reason to choose HTML5 over Flash is that HTML5 is an open, standards-based technology, while Flash is a proprietary technology owned by Adobe. This means that HTML5 is more widely supported and can be used by any web developer, while Flash requires the use of proprietary software and may not be available to everyone.

XML sitemaps can be beneficial for search-optimizing HTML5 sites for many of the same reasons they are useful for search-optimizing other types of sites.

One benefit of XML sitemaps for search-optimizing HTML5 sites is that they provide a way for search engines to discover and crawl the pages on your site. By submitting an XML sitemap to search engines, you can ensure that they are aware of all the pages on your site and can index them properly. This can be especially useful if your site uses HTML5 features that may not be easily indexed by search engines using traditional methods.

Another benefit of XML sitemaps is that they allow you to provide additional information about your pages to search engines, such as the frequency with which they are updated and the importance of each page relative to other pages on your site. This information can help search engines better understand the content of your site and can influence how they rank your pages in search results.

Overall, XML sitemaps can be a useful tool for search-optimizing HTML5 sites by helping search engines discover and crawl your pages and by providing additional information about your pages to help them understand your content better.

XML sitemap example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.net/?id=who</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.net/?id=what</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.net/?id=how</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-09-22</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

See also

• Biositemap, a protocol for broadcasting and disseminating information about computational biology resources (data, software tools and web-services)
• Contact page
• Home page
• Index (search engine)
• Link page
• Search engine optimization
• Sitemaps, an XML standard for URL inclusion
• Web indexing
• XML

External links

• Common Official Website - Jointly maintained website by Google, Yahoo, MSN for an XML sitemap format.
• Template:Dmoz