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Sitemaps are used by webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Search engine spiders usually discover webpages from links within a site and from other sites, but they sometimes don't index all pages, especially if a site has a large number of pages. Sitemaps supplement this data.
A HTML sitemap is a collection of hyperlinks, sometimes with descriptions, on one page or spread across several pages. Sitemaps help visitors to find what they're looking quickly, while at the same time helping search engine spiders crawl and index all the pages within the site.
In its simplest form, a XML sitemap (see Google Sitemap Protocol) is a XML file that lists URLs for a website. It may also include additional metadata about each URL (date of last update, how often the pages are updated, and how important it is relative to other URLs in the site) to better help search engines more intelligently crawl and index the website.
Here is some sample XML sitemap code:
Google Sitemaps is a suite of webmaster tools offered by Google to provide webmasters a free and easy way to make their site more Google-friendly. Google Sitemaps shows you how Google crawls and indexes your site, and specific problems it might be having accessing it. You can also discover which search queries drive traffic to your site, and which version of Google is driving that traffic.
Google supports XML, RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0, Atom 0.3 feeds, OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), and a text file containing a list of URLs.
You could create a sitemap by hand by following the sitemap protocol, but it would be a really tedious task, and you will probably miss a few links. A better method is to use one of the many sitemap generators available. Google offer a free sitemap generator but it is probably too complicated for most people to install. The installation instructions certainly put me off giving it a try. Luckily there are plenty of downloadable and online sitemap generator tools offered by third-parties.
I've only tried a few free, downloadable sitemap generators, but here are my opinions on those I've tested:
The above applications are all for Windows computers only. Mac users may like to try Map-IT SiteMapper ($19.95 and also available for Windows) and RAGE Google Sitemap Automator ($29.95).
I found the above sitemap generators in Google's Sitemaps Third Party Programs & Websites guide. For a full list of the third-party sitemaps programs & websites, visit the Google page.
You can validate your Google XML sitemap with the Google Sitemap Validator by Validome. I'm glad I did as I discovered that the links to the Sitemaps.org XML schema in the sitemaps generated by GSiteCrawler were returning 404 not found errors. As a result I switched to the XML headers in Google's Using the Sitemap Protocol guide.
Log in, or sign up, to Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account, and add your sitemap URLs.
A text sitemap is simply a text file with a list of URLs, one on each line, and is supported by Yahoo! Site Explorer. Unlike XML sitemaps, it does not allow for metadata about each URL.
Here is some sample text sitemap code:
Submit your sitemap to Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Yahoo! supports RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and a text file containing a list of URLs. The filename of the URL list file must be "urllist.txt". The filename for a compressed file must be "urllist.txt.gz". Site Explorer recognizes files with a .gz extension as compressed files and will decompress them before parsing.
Good question! No one seems to know. The best bet is try submitting your sitemap URL to the Windows Live Search URL Submission form.
No. Sitemaps do not guarantee that webpages will be included in search engines, but they should help search engine spiders do a better job of finding and indexing every page within a site.
No. Sitemaps will not influence the way your pages are ranked by a search engine. However, it does help to get them crawled and indexed, which gives your pages a better chance of being ranked.
No.
Yes. Session IDs in URLs may result in incomplete and redundant crawling of your site.
Include both URLs in your sitemap.
This document was written with the help of Sitemaps.org, the official sitemaps website sponsored by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Visit the site for more technical information on sitemaps.
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