It would be useful if ikiwiki was able to create [google sitemap][1] files to allow easy indexing.
-[1]: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
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+[1]: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
+
+> Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can't reach all areas of a
+> website through a browseable interface. (Generally, this is when users are
+> unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links). For
+> example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form
+> would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.
+
+What I don't get is exactly how ikiwiki, as a static wiki that's quite
+deeply hyperlinked, benefits from a sitemap. The orphans plugin can
+produce a map of pages that other pages do not link to, if you're worried
+about having such pages not found by web spiders.
+
+--[[Joey]]
+
+While pages are very interlinked, most people use ikiwiki for blogging. Blogging produces pages at random intervals and google apparently optimizes their crawls to fit the frequency of changes. For me it's not so often that the contents of my blog changes, so google indexes it quite infrequently. Sitemaps are polled more often than other content (if one exists) so it's lighter for the site and for search engines (yes, google) to frequently poll it instead. So it's not that pages can't be found, but it's lighter for the site to keep an up to date index.
+
+-- Sami
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