I have been browsing around on the internet and researching effective sitemap web pages. I have encountered these two sitemaps and questioning their effectiveness.
http://www.webanswers.com/sitemap/
http://www.answerbag.com/sitemap/
Are these sitemaps effective?
I would have thought a HTML sitemap should be useful to a human, whereas these 2 sites aren't. If you're trying to target a search engine then a sitemap.xml file that conforms to sitemaps.org would be a better approach. Whilst the html approach would work it's easier to generate a xml file and have your robots.txt file pointing at this.
Jeff Atwood, (One of the guys who made this site) wrote a great article on the importance of sitemaps.
I'm a little aggravated that we have to set up this special file for the Googlebot to do its job properly; it seems to me that web crawlers should be able to spider down our simple paging URL scheme without me giving them an explicit assist.
The good news is that since we set up our sitemaps.xml, every question on Stack Overflow is eminently findable. But when 50% of your traffic comes from one source, perhaps it's best not to ask these kinds of questions.
So yeah, effective for people, or effective for google?