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I can't find the sitemap. Is there one? I know some websites use a gzip file to compress the sitemap but I can't seem to find that either. Is SO sitemapless?

I'm actually just looking for examples of what a "good" sitemap looks like and that's what provoked this question.

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It does, but we protect it because there was a LOT of abuse around it. Please do not ask.

If you do anything with the sitemap we don't like, your IP will be banned without hesitation.

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  • 15
    I am in your sitemap, drawing ponies and eating waffles. – GEOCHET Sep 2 '09 at 22:16
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    How exactly does a sitemap get abused? This could be interesting. – Joe Phillips Sep 2 '09 at 22:21
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    I wonder if people were using the sitemap to try and maintain live feeds of new questions and answers instead of screen scraping the main page. – GEOCHET Sep 2 '09 at 22:51
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    I too am curious how a sitemap can be abused. – cletus Sep 2 '09 at 23:50
  • Jeff discussed the "site map" in a previous episode of the podcast. Apparently it's HUGE, includes thousands of questions, etc. – Sampson Sep 16 '09 at 23:08
  • It's more or less a dump of SO, or a part of it. Therefore it causes high load and traffic. In the meantime, Jeff even mentioned deploying a second server just to make sure Google doesn't get throttled when indexing. Public availability could harm SO by causing too much resource usage. – Michael Stum♦ Dec 28 '09 at 5:03

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