Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website.
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
What is a Sitemap.xml ?
What is a Sitemap file? Basically, a Sitemap provides a listing of pages on a website. By creating a Sitemap and submitting it to Google, the webmaster ensures that the search engine will have all the needed details about a site. That way, Google will be able to find URLs that cannot be found when Googlebot crawls the web.
A Sitemap is also a practical reference to Google for providing metadata about certain kinds of content, including images, news, mobile and video. For instance, inputting data regarding an image can alert Google as to the topic of the photo, license, and type. A Sitemap also is used to indicate when the content on a site is changed or how often it will be altered.
A Sitemap is especially useful for sites that feature images that may be hard to find by Googlebot or contain pages that aren’t linked or have few included links. Sites that contain compelling information or content can also benefit by the creation of a Sitemap. As a result, the information provided by a Sitemap enables Google to assess the framework of a site and better crawl a site.
What do you think of using XML Sitemaps?
XML Sitemaps are important. It helps search engines crawling your site and articles. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask support the Sitemaps protocol that lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing.
Most importantly, when you have a site that is not crawlable for some reason. Using an XML sitemap will help the search engines know about and discover your URLs on your site that they could not find due to your site’s crawlablity issues.
Also, when you have a site with 1000′s of URLs, using an XML sitemap allows you to set priorities of your URLs so Google and other engines know which URLs you feel are most important and should be indexed first before indexing other URLs on your site.
