Many sites have user-visible sitemaps which present a systematic view, typically hierarchical, of the site. These are intended to help visitors find specific pages, and can also be used by crawlers. Alphabetically organized site maps, sometimes called Site Indexes, are a different approach.
There are three primary kinds of site map:
- Site maps used during the planning of a Web site by its web design|designers. - Human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site. - Structured listings intended for web crawlers such as web search engine|search engines.
For use by search engines and other crawlers, there is a structured format, the XML Sitemap, which lists the pages in a site, their relative importance, and how often they are updated.
Sitemap of Google
- wikimedia.org
This is pointed to from the robots exclusion standard and is typically called `sitemap.xml`. The structured format is particularly important for web sites which include pages that are not accessible through hyperlink from other pages, but only through the site's search tools or by dynamic construction of URLs.
They also act as a navigation aid by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.