Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Sitemaps

A sitemap (with which you may well be familiar) is an HTML page containing an ordered list of all the pages on your site (or, for a large site, at least the most important pages).

Good sitemaps help humans to find what they are looking for and help search engines to orient themselves and manage their crawl activities. Googlebot, in particular, may complete the indexing of your site over multiple visits, and even after that will return from time to time to check for changes. A sitemap gives the spider a rapid guide to the structure of your site and what has changed since last time.

Googlebot will also look at the number of levels – and breadth – of your sitemap (together with other factors) to work out how to distribute your PageRank, the numerical weighting it assigns to the relative importance of your pages.

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