I currently have a website that I have put 250 articles on a specific keyword. The articles are broken up in a proper index format. My questions are: Should I go ahead and create a XML sitemap and submit it to google for this website? On the website I currently have a sitemap that is strictly in html. It's at the bottom and top of the website and links to www.mysite.com/sitemap.html. Should I replace this HTML sitemap with a XML one, making it www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
A XML sitemap serves no purpose to the general user - that's why it's called a 'Google Sitemap' and not just a plain 'Sitemap'
Maybe down the road, browsers will have Sitemap readers, so Sitemaps will be more of a standard like RSS feeds.
General users do not bother about the sitemap and even do not have much knowledge about it, hence is uselss for you to create a sitemap in xml .....may be in future browsers shall be having sitemap reader that time it will be usefull ...now its better to keep it as is.. bye - sofia
The Google sitemap will give you specific benefits at Google and it's not a bad idea to create one. The main sitemap that you link to from all of your pages ought to remain an HTML map. If you'd like to feed your sitemaps to other engines, you can use several other formats including RSS and Yahoo's urllist.txt format. Yahoo also supports the RSS map.
Dear bski, I suggest you to keep both sitemaps. sitemap.html to help visitors & sitemap.xml for crawler.