Hi,
Recently I have observed that some popular sites like olx, clickindia... doesn't show there sitemaps on there sites but they have submitted sitemap to search engines...
I want to know why does they submit to search engines but make them invisible for users. Why???
If you have a website with lots of pages, a simple sitemap that just lists them all isn't much use to a human, but can be very useful to a spider.
If it's not useful to humans, then why show it at all?
Second point: When you submit a sitemap to Google you're usually submitting an XML file. There might not even be an HTML version of it.
Many prominent sites like to keep their sitemap(s) away from curious eyes. Partly to avoid black hat spammers scrapping their whole site effortlessly.
The way you achieve this is to create a sitemap with a different name than the standard sitemap.xml and may be to also put it in a different directory. Then you register it with the search engines so that they know where to find it while most other folks don't.
Although i agree with the other posters i found out that "ClickIndia.com" is not hiding the sitemaps at all. This site provides his sitemaps using the standard "Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file"
Check out http://www.clickindia.com/robots.txt You'll see that the sitemap's are listed there.