SEO – Interesting Sitemap FAQ
As part of Search Engine Optimization strategy, Sitemaps provide a way for the crawlers to index your site. There are 2 types of Sitemaps, Human friendly sitemaps and Crawler friendly sitemap.
Human friendly sitemaps provide a textual map of the website which is being viewed. Some links could be buried deep in a site that could be easily located using the sitemap by humans. Example Microsoft PressPass Sitemap
Crawler Friendly Sitemaps are those which help the crawler to uncover deeplinks in the website and help them understand the site better.
Before Sitemap.org came into existence all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN wanted web masters to format their feed for their crawlers. This made it extremely difficult for the webmasters to submit their updated content automatically to the search engines. Google then came up with http://Sitemaps.org. Sitemaps is an XML based format which is now supported by all major search engines. It is extensible and provides the search engines to better “understand” the website. Unlike the normal sitemap protocol, sitemaps.org protocol provides additional information to search engines like the change frequency of the page, last modified date of the file, the relative priority of a URL when compared to other URL’s in your site. This can help the crawler not only to index the site but also obtain meta information about the site. The sitemaps protocol can be found here
Interesting facts about Sitemaps.org
- The protocol for sitemaps.org was developed by Google but the site is hosted with Yahoo!. A Whois lookup shows that the nameservers for sitemaps.org points to YNS1.YAHOO.COM and YNS2.YAHOO.COM. A good strategy to gather Yahoo support.
- This really isn’t a fact per se, but good to know. The meta description in the Whois reads as “The Sitemaps protocol enables webmasters to information earch engine about pages on their site that are available for crawling”. :-)
Most of the popular blogging platforms like Wordpress, Community Server, Typepad, blogger etc have add-on’s which are SEO friendly.
/Vishnu