ROR Sitemap - describing any object of your content in a generic fashion

As you probably know, Sitemaps provide all kinds of navigational help. It can be of two types, one is for user navigation. Sitemaps are a extended form of navigational aid wherein you display the web site structure with links to major sections and sub-sections. If visitors are able to find information on your site quickly, they will surely come back.

Second one for search engine crawling. Sitemaps are important for making sure your site can be completely spidered and indexed by the search enignes. Unfortunately, many of these sitemaps are specific to one search engine or another. For this reason, there have been a number of google and yahoo site map generators produced in recent years.

However, there is an alternative that is even more exciting. These are ROR sitemaps and they are readable by all search enignes, not just by google or yahoo. A ROR Sitemap allows you to inform search engine crawlers about URLs on your Web sites that are available for crawling. A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain additional information about those URLs, such as when they were last modified, how frequently they change, etc.

ROR is a rapidly growing XML format for describing any object of your content in a generic fashion, so any search engine can better understand that content. ROR information is stored in a ROR file called ror.xml placed in the top directory (root folder) of your website. ROR can describe a large variety of objects: sitemaps, products, services, articles, images, menus, feeds, contact information, business information, reviews, etc. You can think of your ROR feed as a powerful structured feed for describing all your objects to the search engines: products, services, reviews, discounts, images, events, schedule, podcasts, anything you want.

There are many free online tool to generate ror sitemap generator. One useful is RORWEB and another is XML-Sitemaps. Here you can generate ror sitemap for your website. After generating this file your need to upload at root directory as ror.xml.



Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite.