Sitemaps are ususally coded in pure HTML (CSS...), webmasters commonly use a page to describe the structure of their website and they insert this mapping onto their main page or on a different page, so search engines like Google find each link with more ease.

This article overviews the Google sitemaps xml program which is in a BETA state. The use of this XML file is to help search engines crawl the web more efficiently.

For instance this file includes a hierarchy within the links.

As scanning of webpages becomes more sophisticated for search engines; for instance spiders are trying to discourage keywords stuffing and other attempts to boost back links and page rank, new programs must be created to extract relevant websites from the mess.

Yet in a BETA state, Google launched its program for this purpose.

Will other webcrawlers implement this program soon ?, I guess MSN, Altavista... are already thinking about it, a hierarchy within the links is not a bad idea and the use of this file should decrease the time consumed from spidering all these useless links.

The sitemaps file
There are several formats you can use to build your sitemaps file, you can use RSS, txt... However Google recommends the use of its own protocol (I'm curious about what other search engines will do about this !).

I guess we better follow Google and start building our maps right away.

Here is the example from LinksTraffic:

<url> <loc>http://www.linkstraffic.net/</loc> <lastmod>2005-08-25</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>1.0</priority> </url>

<url> <loc>http://www.linkstraffic.net/articles.php</loc> <lastmod>2005-08-25</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> <priority>1.0</priority> </url>

<url> <loc>http://www.linkstraffic.net/privacy.php</loc> <lastmod>2005-08-25</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.5</priority> </url> ... </textarea>

And the full linkstraffic sitemaps xml file: Sitemaps.xml

For important sites, it's advised to use a Sitemaps generator, Google provides one for free and there are some other free tools also.

Once you uploaded your file into your server, you can submit your sitemaps to Google (you need a Google account to achieve this procedure, by the way you will be able to keep in touch with the latest changes from their side).

There are some statistics about Google crawling of your sitemaps, however keep in mind that it may take a while before the first crawl.

Thanks for reading, i hope this article has been useful for some of you, in a next article i will talk about the robots.txt file.

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