Difference between revisions of "Learn/An-HTML-Sitemap-Helps-Search-Engines-Discover-You"

Revision as of 19:05, 22 July 2010

The purpose of a sitemap (aka site map) is to help search engine spiders and crawlers find and index all the pages on a website, and faster than they may otherwise.

Indexing is important because if a page on a website hasn't been indexed by a search engine, it cannot show up for any search query in that search engine.

A sitemap is particularly helpful to websites that have:

several pages that aren't linked to from other prominent pages
lots of pages (more than x)
content in something that is virtually hidden from search engines, like Flash

Types of Sitemaps

The primary type is an XML sitemap. If you have fewer than 50,000 pages you can list them all in a single file. If you have more than 50,000 pages, you'll need to break your xml sitemap up into multiple files and list the files in an index file.

The other type is a simple HTML sitemap, that is just like another web page. You have probably seen these on some sites, as a "sitemap" link in the footer.

You can also create a simple text file with one URL per line or an RSS feed (typically for blogs).

Google recommends creating a sitemap using the Sitemap Protocol because it can be used for other search engines too.

Creating your Sitemap

Sitemap Generators

Make it work: Let the search engines know about your Sitemap

Submitting your sitemap to Google via Google Webmaster Tools is probably the most important thing to do. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to see how many of the pages in your sitemap are indexed at any given time along with other helpful stats.

To the right is a helpful video from ReadyMadeWeb.com about submitting your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, here is Google's instructions for submitting a sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools.

You can also submit a sitemap to Bing using their webmasters tools offering.

If you're familiar with robots.txt you can specify your sitemap there. This will help search engines know where it is and doing this can replace the steps of submitting it to individual search engines.

Points of Order

Sitemaps are purely supplementary. Web pages not in a sitemap can still be found and indexed other ways, such as through links.
XML and text file sitemaps cannot have more than 50,000 URLs per file.
You can have multiple sitemaps, and including the same URL in more than one is okay.
Submitting your site to a search engine is completely unnecessary.
Creating and submitting a sitemap in no way guarantees that search engines will choose to index all the pages. It helps them find the content, but they will only index it if they like what they see.