Newbie Dumb Question: What does it do?

I've got the Sitemap generator installed and (apparently) working.
A few questions have been raised:

- What exactly does the sitemap and generator do? (I can't explain it to my department very well... is there a vBSEO Sitemap Generator for Dummies book out there anywhere?)

- How do I know it's working?

- Can it be used (and if so how?) to help with search engines other than Google and Yahoo?

- On my forum the sitemap displays as a series of links to page 1 2 3 4 5 6, etc... I've placed it in the very bottom of my footer template to keep it out of the human readers' way. Here on the vBSEO forums, I don't see the page numbers, but I do see a link to "SiteMap" near the bottom where you have "Contact Us - vBSEO Home - Site Map - Top" Is this an easy change for me to implement in my forum, or have I gone beyond the realm of vanilla vBulletin for Newbies?

TIA!
-Case

1) The Sitemap generator creates an XML file with URLs in it to all your content. Google,etc then use this to find everything easily.

2) You know its working by going to google.com/webmasters and submitting your sitemap. They will tell you when they looked at it last and if there's any errors in it.


3) other search engines may be able to use it if they support the sitemaps.org open standard.

4) the sitemap is transparent from the forum.... What you are seeing is VBSEO (the product, not the sitemap generator add-on) adding links to the ARCHIVES and re-writing the archives as 'sitemap'. I suggest turning them off. you can do this in the vbseocp.php page (smple on/off switch)