{"id":26019,"date":"2018-11-05T16:54:10","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T16:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.awardspace.com\/?p=26019"},"modified":"2024-10-17T10:22:16","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T10:22:16","slug":"what-is-a-sitemap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.awardspace.com\/blog\/what-is-a-sitemap\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a Sitemap, and How it May Put Your Website at Risk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, we\u2019ve covered how Google works<\/a>. That article was dedicated to revealing how the search engines are working, and what is, if any, the connection between them and our brains. We figured that the search engines are more of sorting engines, showing only the relevant information through billions of possible pages. These pages were previously crawled and stored, thus the engine is not searching simultaneously with you. Yet, it looks through the stored files, trying to find those that are relevant to your search.<\/p>\n

Much like a librarian will look among all the stored and ordered books to find the one that you told him you need.<\/p>\n

Not like the librarian, Google is able to look through the table of contents of each and every \u201cbook\u201d, which helps the user to look not only at \u201cbooks\u201d that he has heard of already.<\/p>\n

While the librarians know the book title and are able to find its number in the lists of the library, they are not obligated to be familiar with the content of the book. This means that if you are looking for a book that explains how sharks are hunted, you\u2019ll have to check every book about sharks.<\/p>\n

But whether you\u2019ll find the information you need in the first or the last book depends more on luck than on anything else.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Google is a librarian that has read a larger or smaller part<\/em> of every book that his library possesses. The search engines are librarians that are also unable to turn the book to the next page, so they jump from chapter to chapter using the table of contents.<\/p>\n

On the web the books are websites and the table of contents is called a sitemap.<\/p>\n

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What is a Sitemap<\/h2>\n

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The utility of the sitemap should be clear by now. Still, it is important for every webmaster to truly understand it if they want their website to be visible to the search engines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Simply put, the sitemap is navigation for the search engines, represented as a list of pages of a specific website.<\/p>\n

According to Wikipedia<\/a>, \u201cthere are three primary kinds of sitemaps\u201d<\/p>\n

Sitemaps are used during the planning of a Website by its designers, human-visible listings, typically hierarchical, of the pages on a site, and structured listings intended for web crawlers such as search engines. <\/strong>Where the latter is the one we are interested in. Specifically, the one that Google introduced, also known as XML Sitemap.<\/p>\n

In the sense that we are concerned with, the simplest possible answer to the question of what is a sitemap is the following:<\/p>\n

A sitemap is an XML file. It consists of website navigation, represented as a list of pages. In this file, the webmaster is providing the Search Engine with information about pages, media, and other files on his website and how they are related between each other. The XML sitemap file helps search engines to more properly read a website. Thus, they are able to rank it to more relevant queries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Google is claiming that, if your site\u2019s pages are properly linked, their web crawlers can usually discover most of your site. Yet, they are advising the webmaster to create and upload a sitemap, because that \u201ccan improve the crawling of your website<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

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How to Create Sitemap<\/h2>\n

Now that we figured creating a Sitemap is a must for every webmaster that wants his contents to be visible to people in the search engines, it is only fair to cover the topic of how to create one.<\/p>\n

If you are using WordPress to create your website<\/a>\/s, I highly recommend you to do the following:<\/p>\n