Sitemap.xml, Site Maps And Spider Maps: Linking Pages Compared

General

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The various site maps and spider maps have different content for different purposes. Here, we compare the types of linking pages for your site.

Page Property	Human Site Map	Sitemap.xml	Spider Map
Purpose	Provide a compact overview of the site's structure and an alternate navigation scheme	Provide links for the search engine spiders to follow	Provide links for the search engine spiders to follow and/or acts as a map for people
Intended Audience	Human visitors	Search engine spiders	Search engine spiders or humans
How Created	By hand	Automatically using sitemap.xml creator or by hand	Automatically using spider map creator or by hand
Links To All Pages On The Site?	Maybe for small sites, rarely for large sites	Always	Always
Links To The Map Are Usually On:	All Pages	robots.txt file, may also be submitted directly to the search engines	Index page is usually sufficient
Anchor Text Linking To Site's Pages	Brief description	None	Title text
Appearance	Matches site format	Plain text (xml) file	Not important
Map Page Organization	Organized by categories or folders	None, just a list of URLs	None, just a list of links

Sitemap.xml Articles: Google, Yahoo And Microsoft Team Up For Sitemaps Protocol and Sitemaps Protocol Supported By Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask

Sitemap.xml Sample: To view an actual sitemap.xml file, download the searchenginepromotionhelp.com database sitemap, this is a small (5 kb) compressed gzip file and needs to be uncompressed for viewing.

Sitemap.xml Creation: Generate sitemap.xml with a free online form.

For an illustration of the difference between site maps and spider maps see site map for Search Engine Promotion Help.com and a sample spider map

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