Difference between sitemap and XML sitemaps

Hi,
I have an idea about xml site maps and I want to know that what is the difference between site map and XML site maps. please tell me.

Thanks in advance

 

Have a look here:

http://myinternetstuff.wordpress.co...ference-between-html-sitemap-and-xml-sitemap/

 

Thanks for response.

 

html sitemap is for human visitors and xml sitemaps are fot bots.
This is what i understand

 

Are you asking if search engines treat them differently or are you asking which is better to provide visitors?

 

There are really three different kinds of sitemaps-

HTML sitemaps
XML Sitemaps
and GSM sitemaps

an HTML sitemap is similiar to a site directory used by visitors to your website

an XML sitemap falls under the sitemap directive that was instituted a few years back and to which all the major search engines adhere.
Under the "sitemap" directive it spells out the place where all spiders/bots/crawlers will look for your machine read url's for the entire site for engine indexing purposes.

In this directive they look for the sitemap.xml url location in the robots.txt file

gsm sitemaps are unique to Google (google sitemap), I use a gsm sitemap on my site, with a 301 redirect for the other engines using /sitemap.xml

 

is it necessary to have the three?
i only have html sitemap, does this mean bots don't crawl my site?

 

Nope-

an html sitemap is old school. The major search engines agreed on a sitemap protocal and that uses an xml sitemap directive.

I use a site directory for Users, and an xml sitemap for seo indexing.

If you want to get in the search listings, it is recommended to have an xml sitemap, and to use the robots.txt sitemap directive.