Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others can use HTML site maps as a launchpad for spidering content.
(These are not the same as XML site maps, discussed later in the section.)
The site map concept is carried over from traditional print publishing. Their purpose is to
list all active pages on the site, very much like a table of contents in a book, and provide a
bird??™s eye view of all the public-facing content. In the primordial stages of the Internet,
there was a debate among information architects between the term ???site map??? and ???table
of contents.??? Ultimately, the snappier and more modern-sounding ???site map??? won over.
The effectiveness of site maps depends on the scale of the site and the level of detail to
which the site map magnifies. Some corporate websites are simply too vast to list every
individual page, and in this case, linking to major sections and notable subsections is sufficient.
On the other hand, some small businesses may only have a handful of unique pages
that are easily listed in one document, such as the example in Figure 4-8. Still other companies
may have a lopsided page depth, where one section contains a disproportionately
large repository of documents.
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