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Sitemaps


The Praetorian

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I'm just curious if anyone knows of any good sitemap tutorials. Specifically for google. And by the way, anyone else notice that google seems to be... broken? I've been reading through posts on one of their message boards, and they seem to be having alot of problems with their bots lately.

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"Site map" is just an HTML page that shows the certain site's content. It's not a new language or anything. For example, look at Quirksmode's site map for example. You notice there are links for all the pages and/or categories on the site.Another way to think about a site map is a Table Of Contents (TOC). When you open an encyclopedia for example, you see that the first (or sometimes last) pages show you the page at which a certain article resides. That's just what a site map is: a page showing you links to other pages of the site.

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I had a feeling you were lookng for the XML style site maps that google is trying to push developers to adopt. I believe you are looking for this specification:http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/...n/protocol.htmlI've toyed with it, but got a few errors the first time through. Supposedly, the solution to my errors are explained here:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/b...wer=34654&hl=en

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i too have a question, why is the need for a XML sitemap, is it really necessary

You do not have to have a site map... You also do not need to have an xml sitemap. A sitemap in html is also helpfull to search engines. I think google just choose to do their sitemaps in XML because the information they were looking for fit easily into XML format. The XML version does allow you to add things like priority and last modification that google may not understand from an html sitemap. so to shorten it up you can make a sitemap in whatever language you want but that doesnt mean that google will understand it.
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What the point is here is that you currently have three options for sitemaps.a.) HTMLb.) XMLc.) both HTML and XML (err, not XHTML)If you code it in HTML, then google (along with all other serach engines) will be happy to use it. Of course, the links should not be broken and should be using teh "title" attribute to increase the relative rating of teh page.If you choose to use XML, then you are limiting yourself to an extent. Since there are only a few search engines that are using this method (makes it easier to insert into their databases since the data is already structutured) your effectiveness will be limited, but your flexibility and the amount of detail you provide the engine increases.Of course, if you were really smart, you would do both - and not just make one exclusive from the other. But make the XML and then XSLT to transofrm that page into HTML - effectively knocking two birds out with one stone.

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