sitemap
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A sitemap is a list of pages on a website.
Why
It can be easier to find the content you're looking for on a sitemap, since they are typically text-heavy pages and do not require navigating through a site which may be loading lots of Javascript or image content.
Organization Examples
Examples of corporate or other organization sites with sitemaps.
- https://www.apple.com/sitemap/
- http://www.ibm.com/sitemap/us/en/
- http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sitemap.aspx
- http://www.w3.org/Consortium/siteindex.html
Subsites
Some sites have subsites, e.g. at subdomains, which have their own sitemaps.
Yahoo (note the inconsistent paths and presentations)
Past Examples
- Google used to have a sitemap at http://www.google.com/sitemap.html however that now redirects to http://www.google.com/about/products/ which still resembles a sitemap but it's not clear if that's its intent (judging by the renaming)
Brainstorming
sitemap microformat
See http://microformats.org/wiki/sitemap for the effort to develop a sitemap microformat to markup visible sitemap pages for semantic crawling and indexing, eliminating any need for a separate XML sitemap sidefile.
XML sitemap
There is also an XML sitemap file format:
However, this XML sitemap file is a sidefile that is subject to the same risks of feed files.
Why XML sitemap
XML sitemap indexing
Google Webmaster Tools suggests[1] creating an XML file in the sitemaps.org format and submitting it with the claim that their crawler can "more intelligently crawl your site"[2]. Despite that, they also say that using a sitemap "doesn't guarantee you that all the web pages listed in your sitemap can be crawled or indexed".
XML sitemap unnecessary
On 2014-12-18, 
Aaron Parecki discovered that his sitemap.xml file had been empty, with no idea of how long it had been empty. Despite that, his content continues to be indexed by Google.