What is sitemap.xml

Hello fellow programmers,

I am building a website and i read about sitemap.xml, but there is no place where i can find a definition or what it contains.

Can someone help me, what 开发者_运维问答does it do? what is it for? what is in it?

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http://www.sitemaps.org/ is the official resource.

The protocol page is probably the most important part of the entire site. It describes how to properly format your sitemap.xml file so that search engines can properly crawl your website.

_{from sitemaps.org}

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.

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It provides information for search engines about the structure of your site. Wikipedia article.

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It's an XML file that contains all of the URLs in your application, along with some other information that is used to make your site easier to crawl for search engines.