Do I need a public "Sitemap" link?

[lancert]

I see a lot of sites that have a sitemap link in their footer (or wherever). Is this necessary for the search engines or do they check for the sitemap XML automatically?

I've also submitted the sitemap XML file to my Google webmaster page. Does a footer link help Google find the XML better?

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

[tokenring]

Hey Lancert,

I would suspect that the HTML version of the sitemap (footer, menu, header, frontend... etc) would only be useful for users of the site. The XML version is for the search engines and crawlers.

Aaron

[lancert]

That's what I suspected. Thanks for your reply.

Does anyone else have any real world testing to see if this actually makes a difference or not?

[tokenring]

we are correct with our original thinking. Any link on the front end of the site that is labeled "Sitemap" is definitely the html version. The HTML version is for sure not crawled by google or search engines for indexing, that is what the xml version is used for.

You can go into your WMT account and search the help on that. It will show you there clearly that you were originally right!



Happy New Year!

tokenring

[lancert]

Thanks Aaron. That's really good to know. I appreciate you taking the time to come back and follow up on this.

Happy New Year to you too!

[sanjayidhatiya]

hello,

can anyone tell me how can i create and show sitemap in my footer area ???????

thanks in advance ..............

[tokenring]

you have to use footer links. Then include your sitemap in the footer links. If you want, you can put a menu item in the footer with many links and the sitemap can be one of them.

Aaron