About XML Sitemaps

THE HISTORY OF XML SITEMAPS AND THE SITEMAP GENERATOR

The sitemap 0.84 protocol was launched by the search engine giant, Google in 2005. This earlier version was designed to use the XML format. Simply put, a sitemap is how a site is organized, making it easy to identify URLs and the information contained in every section. Initially, sitemaps were mainly aimed at website users but Google’s XML format was primarily designed for search engines, making it possible for them to access data faster and with ease.

The increasing number of sites and their complexities was the motivation behind Google’s new sitemap. As has always been the norm, most business or ecommerce sites contained hundreds or thousands of different products in their catalogues. On the other hand, blogging was fast picking up requiring webmasters to update their content at least once daily. Furthermore, online community platforms such as message boards and forums were picking up popularity. With websites content increasing by day, search engines were finding it tough to track all the content and would sometimes skip some information during website crawling because pages were constantly changing.

This led to the creation of XML protocol that made it possible for search engines to effectively track the URLs and boost their search through the placement of all the information in a single page. The frequency in which a website is updated is also summarized by XML as well as data on when changes were last made.

Unlike common belief therefore, XML sitemaps have never been an SEO tool and therefore has no effect on your website’s ranking even though it helps search engines to accurately rank websites and searches. This is done through the provision of necessary data required by search engines, which is very important since there are millions of websites on the web to dig through. 

The XML protocol was published under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license, a move that Google aimed at encouraging its adoption by other search engines. This objective was achieved because it didn’t take long for Yahoo and Microsoft to officially through their weight behind the XML protocol that has since been updated to Sitemap 0.9 protocol with joint sponsorship of www.sitemaps.org, a website that is mainly dedicated to covering all information about the protocol. This is plausible especially bearing in mind that there is stiff competition amongst search engines.

The joint recognition of XML protocol is good news to website developers and webmasters; they don’t have to create a variety of sitemaps for each search engine; a single file can be submitted and whenever changes are made to the site, this file can then be updated accordingly. You can now improve and beef up content on your site without much hassle. It gets better-you can have all that done with the aid of a sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper.

Web pages are ranked based on the relevance of the content to specific keywords, which was a bit tricky before HTML because of large number websites and content. Creating content for web pages, blogs and multimedia files is time-consuming, time that would be considered wasted if the same is not indexed by the search engines in time, this is no longer the case. You can now notify all search engines your xml sitemap’s location by inserting an entry into your robots.txt file.

Create sitemaps fast and efficiently with DYNO Mapper, signup for a sitemap generator today.

Additional Resources:

An Update on Sitemaps at Google
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/update-on-sitemaps-at-google.html

Research study of Sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/04/research-study-of-sitemaps.html

What’s new with Sitemaps
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/whats-new-with-sitemaps.html