Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform
search engines about pages on their sites that are
available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap
is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with
additional metadata about each URL (when it was last
updated, how often it usually changes, and how
important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so
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 learn about those
URLs using the associated metadata. 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.
Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the
Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and
has wide adoption, including support from Google,
Yahoo!, and Microsoft.