Chapter 10. Sitemaps
The concept of website Sitemaps is not new. In the early days of the Internet, having a Sitemap was as important as it is today, but in those days, Sitemaps were primarily intended for human visitors; that they also were helping search engine crawlers was just a side benefit. HTML Sitemaps are the organized collection of site links and their associated descriptions. Use of HTML Sitemaps was and still is one of the “nuts and bolts” of SEO, and they are still the most popular Sitemap type.
Over the years, search engines realized the benefit of Sitemaps. Google jumped on this concept in 2005 with the creation of its own Google Sitemap Protocol. Shortly after, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and IBM jumped on the bandwagon. During 2006, Google Sitemaps Protocol was renamed XML Sitemap Protocol, to acknowledge its “universal” acceptance. The work of these joint efforts is now under the auspices of Sitemaps.org.
The premise of using XML Sitemap Protocol was that it would help search engines index content faster while providing ways to improve their existing crawling algorithms. Using XML Sitemap Protocol does not guarantee anything in terms of better page rankings. Furthermore, use of XML Sitemap Protocol is not mandatory for all sites. In other words, a website will not be penalized if it is not using XML Sitemaps.
This chapter covers several different Sitemap types, including plain-text URL listings, HTML, XML, RSS/Atom, video, and mobile Sitemaps. Not all search engines treat ...
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