Should I add styling to my sitemap?

HTML & CSS
1

Just curious, would anyone recommend that I throw my sitemap on a template and make it accessible through a link, lets say in the bottom nav, to consumers? Right now my sitemap is coded like this:

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
<urlset xmlns=“http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9”>
<url>
<loc>http://www.bluedotsafes.com/safes.html&lt;/loc&gt;
<lastmod>2012-06-14</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>

ect… ect…

</urlset>

2

No, but you could do a page which imports your sitemap and displays it in a styled manner.

3

This would be only beneficial to the user I take it… in other words, i wouldn’t submit a styled sitemap.

Thanks for the reply Dave!

4

Answers to this are based on whether or not you want site users to see a sitemap. The kind of sitemap you cited above is only for search engines, so there’s no point in linking to it publicly as far as search engines are concerned. But I would suggest building something different for users if you want them to have a site map.

5

From personal experience with my own collection of sites that had human friendly
site-map pages I can honestly say visitors to them were exceedingly rare. Visitors
after all are supposed to be able to find things from the sites navigation menu(s).

If you decide to use an online sitemap generator that scans your sites internal links,
DO CHECK the final xml file just in case it’s indexed things you do not want the public to find.

6

That’s true, but what makes sense to one may not make sense to someone else. A sitemap makes it easy/easier for someone to find in one stop. It’s not that hard to do, and there are enough that do use it to make it worthwhile.

7

Personally I would rather create a HTML sitemap that would pass link juice to your important pages (thus good for both humans and in some ways for distributing link juice) than styling an XML sitemap (since the XML sitemaps are meant for the search engines only)

8

It wasn’t hard to do… i just googled a sitemap creator, edited out the links i didnt want listed and threw link on my footer nav… so the next question is why not?

9

If I were you, I would use SimpleXML functions (or similar) in PHP to parse the existing sitemap content into HTML. This is, I think, what DaveMaxwell was referring to in his first answer to you.

Once you have a short PHP script that fetches whatever data you want and displays those data in HTML, you have a fit-and-forget solution. That is an effective and fairly simple way of achieving what I think that you are aiming to do. I might be able to expand a little bit on the SimpleXML stuff if you want more info, although it’s not something that I have used very often.

It is possible to style XML using XSLT, but that (I think) would only be viewable directly in some browsers (and it may not be accessible).

10

You could use XSLT to output HTML - but -
think about what is in a Google sitemap.xml file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

OK, so I can change that to a nifty HTML page. What do I have that I can work with?
The "loc"ation certainly. But is it going to help visitors and would they even care when the page was last modified, how often it changes, or how important I think it is?

I could still add a helpful description and more meaningful link text, but no friendly URLs for bookmarking.

IMHO HTML site maps are a very good idea. But by the time you polish up the Google sitemap.xml you might as well have spent the time on another file no?