Sitemap Generators

In 2006, the search engines Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft launched the Sitemap 0.90 Protocol, which would be using the XML format.

A Sitemap works by providing a XML based map for Search Engines to learn content on your site more effectively. eCommerce (Shopping Cart) solutions are a very good example of a website that can benefit from the use of the Sitemap 0.90 Protocol. Links within a shopping cart are often dynamically generated via shopping cart software applications such as osCommerce and AbleCommerce. Both of these shopping carts use different technology to render their products (osCommerce PHP and AbleCommerce ASP) however they still have the same problem. When generating items such as a new special or sale. How will the search engine know when these pages have changed? This is where the Sitemap 0.90 Protocol helps you as the shopping cart owner you can send an XML file to the search engines to let them know that your content has changed. The only alternative is to wait until the search engine spiders come back around to your site and notice that some page embedded within all of your other pages has changed. Now you can notify the Search Engines as soon as the changes have been made on your shopping cart. Keep in mind this does not mean that your site will be crawled instantly. It does mean that you will have specified that these pages have changed on your shopping cart.