Sitemap

What is a sitemap, And what is the usage of website sitemap, Why they're using sitemap xml files to crawl pages. And why google sitemap is great protocol for site map ?

Sitemap

To define what is site map (Also known as sitemap) is a list of pages included in website to help easy understanding the content and index it.

What is the sitemap types?

There are three types of site map kinds on the internet, We can explain them:

1. Designer Sitemap

Site maps that used during the planning of a Website by the designers designed the website.

2. Human listing Site map

It's the sitemaps that's typically hierarchical of the pages on a website.

Example of users Sitemaps: Brightery Users Sitemaps

3. Search Engines sitemaps

It's the site map designed in XML to give the ability for the crawlers and bot to reach it and read the website content easily. Such as:

Example of XML Sitemaps: Brightery Sitemap

Website Sitemap

Sitemaps may be addressed to be used from users or even for software. Many websites have user-visible sitemaps that is presenting a systematic view (Human listing Site map), containing hierarchical of the site.

These are intended to help website visitors to find specific page, and can also be used by crawlers & Bots. Alphabetically organized site map, And sometimes they're called site indexes.

What is Sitemap XML ?

For the use by search engines and other bots & crawlers, there is a structured format we call it the sitemap xml, which lists the pages in a web site, the relative importance, and how often they are updated with update time.

IT's pointed from the robots.txt file and is typically called the sitemap xml named (Sitemap.xml). The structured format is pretty important for websites which include pages that are not accessible through links from some other pages.

Google Sitemap

Google introduced the google sitemap protocol to help web developers to publish lists of links from across their websites.

There's also some websites having a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms or user entries. The google sitemap files contains URLs to these pages so that online web crawlers can find them. such as Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

Importance of Google Sitemap protocol

To identify the Importance of Google Sitemap protocol the major search engines use the same protocol, having a Sitemap create the availability to have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee that all links going to be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee the indexing process.

Google Webmaster Tools allows the website owner to upload a site map or several sitemaps that Google going to crawl, or they can accomplish the same process to the robots.txt file.

sitemap xml is having replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" process by filling out a form on the search engine's submission page that takes huge time.

Now website owner submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines ( like Google, Bing..etc ) to find it manually.

Regularly submitting an updated sitemap when new pages are published are allowing the search engines to find and index the desired pages more quickly than it would by finding the pages on its by them selves.