sitemaps.org
FAQ

Protocol

Home
Language:
What are Sitemaps?
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.
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the

Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including

support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
Last Updated: 27 February 2008
Terms and conditions