What Is A Sitemap And Why You Need It

What’s a sitemap? Well, DailyBlogTips is here to answer that question for you. It’s a very important piece of your blog, so, listen up to what they have to say….

First things first, what is a sitemap? According to Sitemaps.org:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

The key message is in the second paragraph: “Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data.”

Google and the other search engines rely mainly on their bots and web crawlers to discover new pages around the web. Sitemaps help them in some situations, but they are not compulsory nor necessarily beneficial.

Here is what Google itself says about Sitemaps:

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Resource: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/qa-what-is-a-sitemap-do-i-need-it/