How important is sitemap xml?

[bkannancgn]

I came here to ask this question and got sidetracked responding to another thread.

The reason I ask is because I heard from a SEO person said me that it's pretty important for my site to have a sitemap submit to google webmaster tool, I just want to confirm that's true.

How important do you attribute a sitemap these days? please share your honest answers

 

[PTTed]

The reason I ask is because I heard from a SEO person said me that it's pretty important for my site to have a sitemap submit to google webmaster tool, I just want to confirm that's true.

How important do you attribute a sitemap these days? please share your honest answers

If you have a small website (like about 20 pages or less) and you are certain you have at least one link on your website to every other page on your website (and those links are dofollow links) then you don't really need a sitemap at all.

The larger your site gets, the more important it is for you to have a sitemap. Also, if you do not have lots of internal links from one page to another page all over your site then it becomes more important to have a sitemap.

The main purpose behind the sitemap (in terms of Google) is to help Google find every single page on your website that you want to be indexed in Google. You can also tell it things like how often you update a page and how important you think a page is, but ultimately, Google decides that for themselves anyway regardless of what you tell them.

 

[PluginForage]

Extremely important. Submitting those to the webmaster tools at Google and Bing is the fastest way to get your site indexed and notify engines of changes to site quickly. You should also include in your robots.txt:

Sitemap: http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Just make sure your use the right path and not my example verbatim.

 

[Mark007]

I would say sitemap XML is used to submit in webmaster tool to get your webpages indexed by search engines. XML sitemap is used by crawlers to read through them and know about your webpages. It is a sitemap for the used of search engine bots.

 

[mohan sharma]

Hi, I am of the opinion sitemap is not much important as there are many sites which don't have a site map but are getting a decent amount of traffic.

 

[technaps]

xml sitemap is used for google indexing for your website. so plz always use xml sitemap and html sitemap

 

[elcidofaguy]

Its complete nonsense that site maps are important... Its another myth that keeps perpetuating... Google and other search engines do a great job of indexing your website without them. As a factor which might contribute to rankings there is no actual evidence which shows that this is the case and hence its negligible at best... What matters is the type and quality of links (inbound, internal, external)...

Think about this.... A search engine crawls your website.... and discovers pages... Lets say you add a site map and for the vast majority there is no difference... i.e. Google still crawls the same pages... Do you think just because you have a site map your website will rank better? In the case where a sitemap provides additional pages which have not been indexed then you can be sure of a couple of things:
1) You have issues with your site navigation i.e. you have orphan pages.
2) Those pages most likely have zero inbound links and further zero link juice.

If deeply nested pages have backlinks then for sure they will get crawled and further quality backlinks are seen as votes for your site.... Again site maps are not needed....

The only situation when I would recommend a site map is for sites which have issues due to navigation i.e. derived links from a database such as a drop down list on a ecommerce site with it being obscured by code... But even then one should work to improve user navigation and in cases such as this I would recommend silos to promote such pages internally on a given site... Link juice attribution and how you sculpt the flow is hugely important!!! Site maps does not even come into the equation for that.....

Finally one important point - there are many reasons not to signup for a webmaster account such as when you operate a PBN due to footprints...

Bottom line sitemaps will not improve your rankings, traffic and popularity of your website... The absence of site maps for most will have zero impact given how search engines crawl links on your website... In fact its better for search engines to crawl links and index pages as they go along as then they can accurately determine the semantic relationship between pages and its relevancy.... and you certainly do not need site maps for that!!!

 

[elcidofaguy]

If you have a small website (like about 20 pages or less) and you are certain you have at least one link on your website to every other page on your website (and those links are dofollow links) then you don't really need a sitemap at all..

I think its worth clarifying that nofollow links does not stop search engines from following through and crawling the linked pages... Nofollow simply tells search engines not to credit the linked page with link juice from the parent...

In cases where its nofollow the linkjuice falls into a blackhole (it was used previously as a means to sculpt link juice)...

In order to stop search engines from crawling/indexing the "noindex" attribute is needed either on the page with use of robots meta tag or via robots.txt .... and of course you can also control bot access via htaccess file which is a better method as some bots do not respect the robots directive...

 

[cwvps]

I submitted the sitemap of my website at the very beginning. I also read that this is very important to do in order to speed up the process of indexing. There is also some info that this is important in order to reduce site's bounce rate, but I'm not so sure about this one.

 

[Hrishi Vardhan]

Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages. Sitemap is the way to find your sitepages for search engine bots as well as users.

 

[Rahul Sharma]

XML Sitemaps are vital for SEO in light of the fact that they make it less demanding for Google to discover your webpage's pages—this is imperative since Google positions site pages not simply sites. There is no drawback of having a XML Sitemap and having one can enhance your SEO, so we very prescribe them.