should a sitemap be xtml or html?

[thecrystalcove]

Hello

So i have a sitemap on my website which is html (a kind person on these forums helped me to do this) but i have been told that it should be an xtml sitemap in order for google to crawl all the pages in my site and not just the homepage.

I have little understanding of these things but i have noticed that google is sending visitors from natural listings to my homepage rather than the page relevant to the keywords they searched for so do you think this could be why?

If the sitemap does need to be xtml could someone help me to change it?

thanks so much
sarah

[leehack]

They are 2 different things Sarah, your html sitemap is that on your site and should be left as is. To add an xml sitemap for Google, i'd recommend the Google mash product from Mole End, that will create the xml file for you and upload it to your site for Google's use. Don't confuse the two, they're different things serving different purposes.

[Mike Hughes]

I'd add, hopefully to avoid confusion:

The HTML sitemap web page is there for people and web browsers. Google follows links on web pages and indexes all the pages it finds.

The XML sitemap is a special case of a sitemap that is purely there for Google to read to tell it where your pages are.

In most cases, the HTML sitemap and natural links on your website will allow Google to find and index all the pages on your website.

In some special cases, such as where you might have pages that are buried deep in the website (i.e. lots of clicks away from the home page) or where you have too many pages for google to like all the links on the one sitemap page* then you ought to have the sitemap xml. Some people like to have one anyway to avoid any doubt.

Mike

* Google's quality advice is to have no more than 100 links on a page to make sure the links are followed and to avoid potentially being seen as spammy. A large site's sitemap can exceed this which is one very good reason for having the xml file. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

PS. The home page doing best in the results is a natural consequence of that being seen as the most important page. If Google see it as being relevant, they will often send visitors there even if other pages on your site are more relevant (just seen as less important).