Site Map

A site map is a list of pages of a web site.

A website is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server.

There are three primary kinds of site map:

Site maps used during the planning of a Web site by its designers.

Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site.

Structured listings intended for web crawlers such as search engines.

A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search, which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query.

A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, typically for the purpose of Web indexing.

Sitemaps may be addressed to users or to software.

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.

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.

Alphabetically organized site maps, sometimes called site indexes, are a different approach.

For use by search engines and other crawlers, there is a structured format, the XML Sitemap, which lists the pages in a site, their relative importance, and how often they are updated.

In computing, Extensible Markup Language is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.

This is pointed to from the robots.

txt file and is typically called sitemap.

. The structured format is particularly important for web sites 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 URLs in JavaScript or Adobe Flash.

Adobe Flash is a deprecated multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich Internet applications, desktop applications, mobile applications, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players.

JavaScript, often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that conforms to the ECMAScript specification.

Flash, flashes, or FLASH may refer to:

They also act as a navigation aid by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.

Google introduced the Sitemaps protocol so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites.

Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products.

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 contains URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them.

Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

Since the major search engines 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.