SiteMap
A very recent experience I had with on-line site map generators may be of interest to others.
What is a site map? It is a list of text links to pages within a website. Sort of like the ‘contents’ section at the begining of a book. It will closely resemble the outline you used to construct your website. Each link goes to a page. If that page has links to additional content, they are also listed in the map. In short, a site map is an overview of the content made available on a website.
Take a look at this webpage. It is my RF Amplifier page. The links located in the right hand, yellow sidebar above the ads are my site map.
A site map does not have to be fancy but the link descriptions need to be as informative and accurate as possible. Coming up with informative and accurate descriptions is the job of the webmaster, presumably you. Site map generators only read what they find at the URL you give them.
It is hard to imagine a website that does not have a site map. It would be like investigating an unsolved game of Zork.
Even so there are those who would have you think that a site map is something special. Special enough for them to offer ‘free’ on-line services capable of generating your special site map code upon submission of some data.
I tried one of these services last night. The resulting code was an ordered list of all my text links to content pages. Imagine that! How utterly surprising!
I brought the code up with a browser and discovered what made this particular site map so special. It contained a claim to copy rights on behalf of the people providing the site map generating software!
On closer inspection of the source code I found a comment declaring that I was not allowed to remove their copyright claim.
I am not sure if their copyright only covered the code that they generated or lay claim to my entire website content now and forever, but I was taking no chances.
I guess they were not aware that claiming copyrights to material generated by others amounts to stealing.
So, if you are considering having a site map generated by one of these on-line site map generating services, take a very close look at the code that is generated. That generous offer to help you create your site map may be just an invitation to allow them to steal your content by laying copyright claims to it.