Major Search Engines Collaborate on Web Index Tool - A Quick Visit to Sitemaps.org
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Visitors to Sitemaps.org are greeted by a home page that defines the term Sitemap and explains why webmasters and publishers may want to use a Sitemap. It says right out in the open that "Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site." There's a link at the bottom of the home page that leads to the terms and conditions of use. These are relatively short and pretty vanilla.
There are three links at the top near the right hand corner of the page: one for home, one for protocol, and one for frequently asked questions. The Protocol link leads to a long page that describes the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol. This was clearly written for the webmasters and others who handle the technical details of a web site; still, given that, it's actually pretty understandable even for someone with limited technical knowledge. The designers of this page did what they could to make it as readable as possible, including links that jump to seven different sections of the document.
I was glad to see an explanation that even I could understand for how to validate your Sitemap! The page also explains how to extend the Sitemaps protocol (presumably for including meta data that gives extra information about the page you're submitting). It's worth noting that there is a certain amount of flexibility for each search engine within the protocol. At the very beginning, the protocol page notes several tags that must be present, and adds that "All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine's documentation for details." It would be very nice, in the future, if Sitemaps.org links the words "search engine's documentation" to go to another page that links to documentation for all search engines involved in Sitemaps.org. Such a setup would help with Sitemap.org's apparent goal of being a one-stop shop for Sitemap information.
For those of us who aren't quite so techie or respond better (at least initially) to information formatted a little differently, Sitemaps.org provides a helpful FAQ page. Here you can learn the answers to specific questions, such as how large you can make your Sitemap (10 MB with 50,000 URLS maximum), what character encoding method to use (UTF-8), and more. At least some of these questions are answered in the actual Sitemaps protocol page, but it's still a good idea to have a FAQ page that includes this information.
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