Member Avatar for HelenLF

I have a friend who has a Flash/html site at present.
The company running the site offered to add a sitemap. However this is merely navigational links at the bottom of the page with a heading 'sitemap'. Would this be of any value from an SEO point of view, or would a proper sitemap on a separate page be better?

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Short answer: a footer list labelled "sitemap" is usually just an HTML (human) sitemap — useful for users and a bit of crawl help, but not the same thing search engines expect. Search engines rely on a machine-readable sitemap (XML, text, or feed) to quickly discover and understand site URLs, metadata and special content (images, video, news). As hinted, an HTML sitemap is a nice supplement but not a replacement for a proper XML sitemap. Google: What is a sitemap. (developers.google.com)

Practical checklist to fix this quickly:

  • Look for /sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml at the site root and check robots.txt for a Sitemap directive.
  • Generate an XML sitemap (or a sitemap index for large sites) that lists canonical URLs and, where useful, lastmod/changefreq.
  • Make sure the sitemap does not include blocked or noindex pages and keep sitemap size/URL limits in mind (50,000 URLs / 50MB per file; use indexes or gzip as needed). See the Sitemaps protocol for details. (sitemaps.org)

If the site is Flash-based: Flash content is effectively obsolete and often invisible to modern crawlers and browsers (Adobe ended support December 31, 2020). Convert or provide real HTML fallbacks (server-rendered or HTML5) so content is crawlable and accessible — a sitemap alone won’t make embedded Flash indexable. Adobe: Flash EOL info. (adobe.com)

Quick commands to finish the job: add Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml to https://example.com/robots.txt, upload the XML sitemap to your server, then verify and submit it in Google Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools). Keep the human-readable sitemap for visitors, but treat the XML sitemap as the primary signal to search engines. Google: robots.txt & Sitemaps guidance. (developers.google.com)

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Member Avatar for almostbob

Sitemaps for SEO are not human readable
the sitemap is a machine readable file detailing the file structure, in its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about change frequency, relative importance, useful sitemaps can be generated at many freeware sites, I use the one at auditmypc.com
a human readable 'sitemap' is just the site developer stating that their navigation system does not work

IF the provider has added a sitemap it is possible that the link table at the bottom is only a human readable extension of the xml machine sitemap
search the site for a 'sitemap.xml' file
if there is not one, create and install one, ensure the navigation system is logical, and remove the links added by the provider
The google webmaster tools pages give relevant instruction on sitemap provenance, suggest to your friend, that they sign up to google webmaster tools, read and follow all the instructions, >>--humor-->and get the benefit of google's wisdom about SEbots

If using flash, try to enable textreader extensions in flash (exactly how depends on which software is being used to make the flash)
text reader extensions are a disability aid, that embeds descriptive text in the flash files, like closed captioning. SE Bots can index that text, removing much of the zero ranking that flash sites receive as un-indexable

Edited by almostbob because: n/a
Member Avatar for HelenLF

Thanks for the quick reply. Really helpful and exactly what I was looking for.

Member Avatar for Jennifersarah

It's really a very informative post. I know only the basic things about sitemap. Now i clearly understand the difference between machine readable and human readable sitemap.

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