XML or HTML Sitemap? Which Is The Preferred Site Map For Google?

By Raj | Oct 12, 2009

This post is for my blogger and webmaster friends, as you might already be knowing from the tagline of this blog that I do not confine to medical transcription alone on this blog but any informative subject that’s worth sharing with my readers and my friends.

If you have been blogging, you might have known the importance of a sitemap on your site with relation to search engine optimization and the difference between an XML sitemap and an HTML sitemap. For others, what is an XML sitemap, and what is the difference between an XML sitemap and an HTML sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is placed in the root folder of a domain, for eg., like http://mtherald.com/sitemap.xml which is completely intended for search engine spiders to have an idea on which direction to travel further after landing on the website, to have a fair knowledge on the new posts that have been created on the site after the search engine spider left the site last time, and the importance of each page, where as an HTML site map is a human readable sitemap, something like the HTML sitemap of MT Herald, that won’t have all those statistics mentioned above but will purely be a page full of links leading to all the sections of the website, useful for surfers especially on multilayered sites to locate a specific content. In general, both sitemaps are crawlable by search engine robots that I had a doubt for a long time “Why the heck you need two sitemaps if the search engine crawlers can crawl the HTML sitemap as well, after all the basic path of search engine bots is to jump from one link to other eating the contents inside?”

XML site map or HTML sitemap? Which is the preferred sitemap for Google?

However, Google is a fort that you can’t get inside to know what’s happening inside and to know about their likes and dislikes! The other available alternatives would be their one-way communication tools like Google webmaster guidelines, (which are essentially rules rather than guidelines that you have to abide what is said there, else face a penalty) or the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog where you have to go with the flow of the discussions there rather than raising your own doubts.

However, once in while Google conducts webmaster chat where you can raise your doubts on search engine strategies, or if you can wade to reach Matt Cutts, Google’s (un)official spokesperson and Head of Google’s Webspam Team, on Twitter and impress him, you can put across your question, though the second option could be less successful.

So during the last Google webmaster chat, I raised the aforesaid doubt to those at Google, and now, Matt has clarified that doubt in his recent webmaster video last week. Watch this video with your headsets on:

Conclusion: Though availability of both HTML and XML sitemaps are preferable and that Google’s Webmaster Guidelines prefers XML site map, you can abstain from creating an XML sitemap if you wish to do so as the search engine bots are well versed with HTML sitemaps. Thanks Matt for picking up this interesting question, you bet – he is happy to help.

Tags: search engine optimization, search engine strategies, sitemap

4 Responses to “XML or HTML Sitemap? Which Is The Preferred Site Map For Google?”

Dhiraj Kartik on October 13th, 2009, at 1:21 am said:

Dear sir;

I have been following ur blogs for sometime and i would like to thank u for the amount of information that u r disseminating through ur blogs. waiting for more……..

Raj on October 13th, 2009, at 4:30 am said:

Wow. That’s a tremendous boost for my morale. Thanks Dhiraj, but please drop that “Sir.” I am a friend of all the readers of this blog and the word “Sir” elevates me to something like the teacher-student relationship.

Thanks again.

Dhiraj Kartik on October 13th, 2009, at 1:09 pm said:

am a fellow mt, transcribing since 2005, found u 2 be my senior…did not feel it wud be nice to call some one senior to me by name…ok…i will replace sir with “bhai”

Raj on October 13th, 2009, at 1:12 pm said:

Ok. Agreed. As you wish.