XML - Google Sitemap

• Posted by PRO-Webs, Support
• 02 May 2009
• S, W & X

A search engine sitemap, sitemap.xml or Google sitemap are all the same thing... These sitemaps are search crawler (spider) specific data created to observe Sitemaps protocol which allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site in faster xml data format. It also allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: location (loc), when the url was last updated (lastmod), how often it changes (changefreq), and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site (priority). This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently and effectively. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. These sitemaps are often referred to as Google sitemaps because Google spearheaded the development of the protocol and supports it most vigorously of the search engines. This sitemap is not intended, nor formatted for human visitors like a HTML sitemap is.