Hermetic Sitemap Builder 6.05

This program scans a copy of your website on your hard disk and generates either (i) an HTML sitemap to assist readers of your website to navigate or (ii) an XML Sitemap to assist search engines to index your website. It allows selection of file types to be included and exclusion of files that you don't want included in the sitemap. For XML Sitemaps, automatic setting of the 'change-frequency' and 'priority' tags is supported. HTML sitemaps include either the title or the filepath as hotlinks, and the description tag may be included.

The original method used by search engines to index a website was to start at the home page and follow links to other pages on the site. But as websites became more complex not all files on the site could be reached in this way, and this motivated search engine providers to devise a way to help search engines to index websites. The result was the Sitemap protocol (introduced by Google in 2005).

A Sitemap (with a capital 'S' to distinguish them from HTML sitemaps) is an XML file which allows a website manager to provide information about the files on a website, most importantly, the URL for each file and the date of its last modification (and also how often the file changes and how important it is in relation to other files on the website). A Sitemap is placed on a website with a pointer to it from a robots.txt file so that a search engine, visiting that website, knows where to find it.

If a website has many files then it is very tedious to create a Sitemap manually (and to edit it for changes), so Sitemap generator programs have been developed. These are of two kinds: (i) Those which request the home page of a website (usually index.html) on the webserver and follow the links. (ii) Those which begin with the top folder of a website on the website manager's local hard disk and process all files in that folder and in all subfolders — perhaps with the exception of files which (in some way) have been excluded.

Sitemap generators of the first kind use the original method of indexing and thus are subject to the problems that Sitemaps were devised to overcome. Hermetic Sitemap Builder is a Sitemap generator of the second kind, and supports exclusion of files that you don't want included in the Sitemap.

Hermetic Sitemap Builder can generate both XML Sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. For a given website the two kinds will usually use the same specifications (by the website manager) for exclusion of unwanted files and folders, and so will list the same files. In some cases, however, it is desirable that they be somewhat different, and this program supports ways to achieve this, as explained in the user manual.

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