The Importance of a Human Readable HTML Sitemap for a Web Directory
A human readable sitemap is nothing else than a page, linked from the homepage, that is linking to all pages of your website. This kind of sitemap seems to be very important for search engines (even if it is called “human readable sitemap”).I have recently decided to add one to the Linkrain Web Directory, which you can see here. From my experience a HTML sitemap is important because of PageRank distribution. By creating a sitemap containing HTML links to all the pages of your website and by linking this page frm your homepage, it will surely get a good PageRank and pass this PageRank to all the pages listed on it.
Many websites don’t use a HTML sitemaps because it’s not important for them to have inner pages with PageRank but for a Web Directory it’s surely on of the most important factors. All those Web Directories built on an expired domains that have only one page (the homepage) with PageRank, are completly worthless. Getting a good inner PageRank is quite hard because you will need to get some quality backlinks for each of your pages and this can be really expensive (even if it’s something you will have to do).
After getting many of Linkrain’s categories linked by other websites and after achieving a PageRank for most of them, I decided to try if it’s possible to increase inner PageRank by adding a HTML sitemap to the directory. I had this idea after visiting Linkforever, a Web Directory which is offering a MOD for phpLD that creates a html sitemap within a few seconds after installing it (the cost of this mod is 15$).
Before buying this mod I checked nearly 50-60 categories of Linkforever, and all of them had at least a PageRank of 2. Even 3rd level categories had a PageRank of 2. After a quick look at their sitemap, I noticed that it achieved a PageRank of 4, and that it passed some of this juice to each categorie of the directory (of course there are also some categories without PageRank, but I think that these are new ones and that they will get a PageRank with the next Google PR update).
For a Web Directory, a html sitemap is not necessary, but surely very important and also an easy way to pass some of the PR juice to all categories.
