Site map

They also act as a navigation aid[1] by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.

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.

Google introduced the Sitemaps protocol so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites.

The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries.

Since the major search engines use the same protocol,[3] having a Sitemap lets them have the updated page information.