sitemap
This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.
A sitemap is a list of pages on a website.
Why
It can be easier to find the content you're looking for on a sitemap, since they are typically text-heavy pages and do not require navigating through a site which may be loading lots of Javascript or image content.
IndieWeb Examples
Zachary Kai
https://zacharykai.net/sitemap.xml (XML)
Anthony Ciccarello
Anthony Ciccarello has a human readable sitemap since 2024-10-25.
Zinzy Waleson Geene
Zinzy Waleson has a human-readable sitemap on https://zinzy.website/sitemap (HTML)
Add yourself!
Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Past Examples
Bret Comnes
Bret Comnes, archived example (XML)
Organization Examples
Examples of corporate or other organization sites with sitemaps.
- https://www.apple.com/sitemap/
- https://www.ibm.com/sitemap/
- http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sitemap.aspx
- https://www.un.org/en/site-index
- https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/site-map.html
Subsites
Some sites have subsites, e.g. at subdomains, which have their own sitemaps.
Past Examples
- Google used to have a sitemap at http://www.google.com/sitemap.html however that now redirects to http://www.google.com/about/products/ which still resembles a sitemap but it's not clear if that's its intent (judging by the renaming)
- The W3C had a sitemap at http://www.w3.org/Consortium/siteindex.html but that page was redirected to the homepage in 2023. (archived version)
- Yahoo subsites had their own sitemaps. Note the inconsistent paths.
- Yahoo news had a sitemap at https://my.news.yahoo.com/sitemap/ until 2014 (archive)
- Yahoo finance had a sitemap at http://finance.yahoo.com/sm until 2017 (archive)
Brainstorming
sitemap microformat
See http://microformats.org/wiki/sitemap for the effort to develop a sitemap microformat to markup visible sitemap pages for semantic crawling and indexing, eliminating any need for a separate XML sitemap sidefile.
sitemap graphic
The [Internet Archive] has a sitemap graphic which shows the pages of a site by path segment.
Example: ciccarello.me sitemap
XML sitemap
There is also an XML sitemap file format:
However, this XML sitemap file is a sidefile that is subject to the same risks of feed files.
Why XML sitemap
XML sitemap indexing
Google Webmaster Tools suggests[1] creating an XML file in the sitemaps.org format and submitting it with the claim that their crawler can "more intelligently crawl your site"[2]. Despite that, they also say that using a sitemap "doesn't guarantee you that all the web pages listed in your sitemap can be crawled or indexed".
XML sitemap unnecessary
On 2014-12-18, 
Aaron Parecki discovered that his sitemap.xml file had been empty, with no idea of how long it had been empty. Despite that, his content continues to be indexed by Google.