Aug 2nd, 2007 by admin 6,114 Views
A human readable sitemap is nothing else than a page, linked from the homepage, that is linking to all pages of your website. This kind of sitemap seems to be very important for search engines (even if it is called “human readable sitemap”).I have recently decided to add one to the Linkrain Web Directory, which you can see here. From my experience a HTML sitemap is important because of PageRank distribution. By creating a sitemap containing HTML links to all the pages of your website and by linking this page frm your homepage, it will surely get a good PageRank and pass this PageRank to all the pages listed on it.
Many websites don’t use a HTML sitemaps because it’s not important for them to have inner pages with PageRank but for a Web Directory it’s surely on of the most important factors. All those Web Directories built on an expired domains that have only one page (the homepage) with PageRank, are completly worthless. Getting a good inner PageRank is quite hard because you will need to get some quality backlinks for each of your pages and this can be really expensive (even if it’s something you will have to do).
After getting many of Linkrain’s categories linked by other websites and after achieving a PageRank for most of them, I decided to try if it’s possible to increase inner PageRank by adding a HTML sitemap to the directory. I had this idea after visiting Linkforever, a Web Directory which is offering a MOD for phpLD that creates a html sitemap within a few seconds after installing it (the cost of this mod is 15$).
Before buying this mod I checked nearly 50-60 categories of Linkforever, and all of them had at least a PageRank of 2. Even 3rd level categories had a PageRank of 2. After a quick look at their sitemap, I noticed that it achieved a PageRank of 4, and that it passed some of this juice to each categorie of the directory (of course there are also some categories without PageRank, but I think that these are new ones and that they will get a PageRank with the next Google PR update).
For a Web Directory, a html sitemap is not necessary, but surely very important and also an easy way to pass some of the PR juice to all categories.
i always make sure to install a sitemap for my blogs
[…] that is linking to all pages of your website. This kind of sitemap seems to be very important for search engines (even if it is called “human readable sitemap”).I have recently decided to add one to the […]
I always use both html readable sitemaps as well as submit xml and .txt sitemaps to both google and yahoo respectively. they also speed things up as far as indexing.
actually human readable site map is better because it solve both purposes. Links to all pages visitor can find that pages easily on the other hand increases page rank
I really appreciate this post. I NEVER thought that hard about the sitemaps. I’ve created a couple, for google, but never kept up with updating or submitting anywhere else.
But I do have 2 questions:
Do you simply create this “human readable site map” and place it on your blog?
And HOW do you create the “human readable….”?
Thanks for the info and insights!
For a Wordpress blog there are plugins that make a human readable sitemap.
For Directories there are MODS. For other website types you can create them manually or use some kind of sitemap software.
Are we missing your next post? I checked your blog couple of times after my last visit but could not find further update… Waiting buddy!
Yeah i noticed it died down here for a while
Well man, I was always thinking that an xml sitemap would be enough. I did not look at that angle of pagerank distribution.
I will also be hosting a web directory and sure it would be very important that they all get more or less the same page rank.
html sitemap will definately help as most of search engines still prefer mainly html
nice info — thanks
yes i agree is html is very most important to search engines to crawl the sites pages. Its help the spiders to retrieve the data.
Site maps submitted to Google are of great use
[…] that is linking to all pages of your website. This kind of sitemap seems to be very important for search engines (even if it is called “human readable sitemap”).I have recently decided to add one to the […]
For SEO purpose, there is two sitemaps that must be created : Human Sitemap and Engine Sitemap. As mentioned a readable human sitemap is meant for visitors’ navigation purpose. Engine sitemap is in the extension sitemap. xml and is meant for the search engine robots or spiders to navigate easily around the site.
Agreed. I actually tested this on one of our web design sites.. It is very true indeed. Always have both, XML and HTML sitemaps.
thanks
Tested it, yet again on another website I had developed.. Major difference.
HTML works really great. Getting the spiders to check on around the site.
Thanks
Nice Info