A sitemap (or site map) is a url inclusion protocol document that represents the structure of your own website which has an hierarchial organization that helps and make it easier for search engine spiders or bots to scan through all the pages of a website, making it a Crawler-friendly website. Sitemap is sometimes used as planning tools in designing a page or a website and make future plans through it. 
It can improve the websites search engine optimization when the website does not use html anchor text/hyperlinks for the website's menu and no links from the homepage towards some of the contents. It is very helpful for big website with vast number of contents that would like all their content to be indexed by search engines. The sitemap idea is now supported by almost all major search engines in the market. But the use of sitemap does not guarantee that it would affect the search engine results page rank of a certain content or a content being indexed or included in search engine results.
Sitemaps was first introduced by Google in June 2005 and later MSN and Yahoo announced a joint support over the Sitemap protocol in November 2006. Leading to an improvement in the Sitemap version. In April 2007, Ask and IBM announced their support and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced auto-discovery of sitemaps through robot.txt. In May 2007, websites of some US States like Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia announced the use of sitemaps in their sites.
The are also some special sitemaps like Biositemap that allows scientists, engineers, centers and institutions engaged in modeling, software tool development and analysis of biomedical and informatics data to broadcast and disseminate to the world the information about their latest computational biology resources (data, software tools and web-services).
If some of your webpages, are blocked by mister robot.txt, use sitemaps to create a possibility of being indexed in the search engines. Use the scriptol's Simple Map and Java Site Map Generator.
Sitemap Introduction - collection of webpages
blog comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
