sitemaps.org Home Protocol FAQ Language: English What are Sitemaps? Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters t0 inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling: In its simplest form; Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for site along with additional metadata about each URL (when was last updlated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLS in the site) 50 that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from Other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and eam about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap PIOtocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers t0 do better job of crawling your site. Sitemap 0.90 offered under the terms of the Attrbution-ShareAlike Creative Commons