Sitemaps

Search engine optimization is a never ending journey.

This week, one of our siloed business units provided XML and TXT versions of sitemaps to provide at the root directory of our site. Our web team was left scratching our head at this decision and I was asked to research best practices in creating and posting sitemaps.

In a short period of time, I learned that our HTML sitemap was an unrecognizable format according to Google. How could it not render an HTML sitemap? The answer is simple: Google prefers XML sitemaps, which essentially look like the same kind of XML you would see with an XML RSS feed.

Inversely, I learned that Yahoo! prefers TXT sitemaps posted at your root directory.

Now we're in a bit of a quandary. I am in the process of figuring out the best way to design and maintain our XML and TXT sitemaps. Furthermore, I am trying to figure out how I can integrate this business unit's sitemap with ours without duplicating efforts. And I am wondering how often I will need to create these sitemaps on an ongoing basis. So far, I've found some helpful links which I will include below.

Sitemap Generators:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Sitemap Best Practices:
http://www.sitemaps.org/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

I'm interested to fast forward to see what the outcome is of our situation. More to come!