: Is there any benefit to having a link to your website's XML sitemap? In Google's WebmasterTools, I submitted my site's XML sitemap, which is accessible through www.mysite.com/sitemap. However,

@Pierce454

Well XML sitemap is pretty beneficial for the website. Because XML sitemap is having bunch of all link present on you site, and it make more easier for the Google and another search engines crawler to crawl overall pages of you website.

This will help your site that whole pages of you website is been get index in search engine, but technically you don't need to mentioned it's link on the webpage or homepage because it's uneasy for use to figure out what the file is all about.

Yes! you can create HTML sitemap for that in which you can list all of the webpages and represent them in proper categorization. Which will also make user happy to drive around pages of you website.

hop that helps, thanks.

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@Phylliss660

I realize this has an accepted answer already, but a sitemap doesn't really have to be a scary proposition for a user. I link my sitemap in my footer, and use an awesome XSLT file from Joost de Valk that transforms it into a XHTML page. The article and download are here: yoast.com/xsl-stylesheet-xml-sitemap/

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@Karen161

The XML sitemap really is for search engines (ie, Google) and not humans. Put it on your root and give Google the path to it in your Google Webmaster account, as you did.

Make sure you keep it updated, since that really is the benefit of an XML Sitemap. I keep mine updated with a custom cron job that runs a PHP script to generate the new XML Sitemaps every night. This gives Google new links to news items or updates to pages that might have been made in the CMS over the past 24 hours.

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@Ogunnowo487

The only place on your site where you might place a link (or URL reference) to your XML sitemap is in your robots.txt file. This will allow Google and all the other search engines you've not explicitly submitted a sitemap to, that support this extended robots.txt syntax, to find your XML sitemap:

Sitemap: example.com/Sitemap.xml

Absolute or relative URL?

As mentioned in comments, the specification defines it as an absolute URL, however, the StackExchange network use a root-relative URL:

#
# this technically isn't valid, since for some godforsaken reason
# sitemap paths must be ABSOLUTE and not relative.
#
Sitemap: /sitemap.xml

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@Megan663

I don't think that a visitor wants to read a XML-based sitemap. This type of sitemap is a good option for search engines like google so that the search engine can find really all sites of your project.

A sitemap has no guarantees for a better ranking of your sites but it is usefull if you use flash or JS menus whose links are invisible for bots.

For users just provide a structured navigation.

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