A sitemap is a list of pages of a

web site A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, ...

within a domain. There are three primary kinds of sitemap: * Sitemaps used during the planning of a website by its

designers A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exper ...

* Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site * Structured listings intended for

web crawler Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spider ...

s such as

search engines Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases. By content/topic Gene ...

Types of sitemaps

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 Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

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

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

s in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

XML sitemaps

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

introduced the Sitemap 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 contain URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them.

Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...

, Google,

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol. Since the major

search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s 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.Joint announcement
from Google, Yahoo, and Bing supporting Sitemaps 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.

Sample

Below is an example of a validated XML sitemap for a simple three-page website. Sitemaps are a useful tool for making sites searchable, particularly those written in non-HTML languages. http://www.example.net/?id=who 2009-09-22 monthly 0.8 http://www.example.net/?id=what 2009-09-22 monthly 0.5 http://www.example.net/?id=how 2009-09-22 monthly 0.5

References

External links

Common Official Website
- Jointly maintained website by Google, Yahoo, MSN for an XML sitemap format. {{Authority control Search engine optimization Information architecture Web navigation

Types of sitemaps

XML sitemaps

Sample

See also

References

External links