“What is A Site Map?”

Thats a good question Amie as people new to site building aren’t aware that there are actually 3 types of site maps, each with it’s own specific purpose. The three type of sitemap are;

1. sitemap.html
2. sitemap.xml
3. sitemap.xml.gz

Way back during the ‘wildwest’ days of the internet (10 years ago), web surfers liked a concise way to scan the contents of the site they were viewing and, necessity being the mother of invention, the site map was born. This type of site map was really only a normal ‘.html’ page containing short descriptions and links to the sites resources. Later on as the web matured (5 years ago), the site map was also used as a way for spiders to find all you sites pages. The only real reason for this was due to poor or broken site navigation.

Now that we have entered ‘Web 2.0′, the site map has been reincarnated as a search engine specific tool. This current not for human consumption incarnation of the sitemap is designed to let the search engine spiders find each page of our web site with out having to follow hyperlinks throughout the site. This type of sitemap uses the ‘.xml’ format file extension and is located at the root of the publicly accessible portion of the domain.
The third type of sitemap is a Google specific archive ending in .xml.gz and is simply a compressed version of your .xml sitemap.

So there you have it!