A sitemap... What's the purpose?
-
Hello everybody,
my question is really simple: what's the purpose of a sitemap?
It's to help the robots to crawl your website but if you're website has a good architecture, the robots will be able to crawl your site easily!
Am I wrong?
Thank you for yours answers,
Jonathan
-
I highly recommend checking out the Webinar Friday Rand did on this very subject: Getting Value from XML Sitemaps, HTML Sitemaps & Feeds.
-
If you have a static site with twenty pages that doesn't get new pages added very often then yes, a site map probably isn't of a whole lot of use if your website has good architecture.
However, if your site is 30,000 pages and gets new content added regularly, then an xml sitemap is useful to make sure that the engines know about all of your pages.
Using multiple sitemaps can be useful to help you diagnose what type of content Google is crawling best. A hypothetical example is that you have a large site where you a) sell baking supplies b) have recipes and c) have user profiles that you want indexed. You could submit a site map for each area (then a master sitemap that lists each of the sub sitemaps).
In Google Webmaster Tools, you get a report that says how many pages you submitted for each site map, and how many of those pages are indexed. using the above setup, you might find something like:
baking supplies has 50 URLs indexed out of 2000 submitted
recipes has 10,000 URLs indexed out of 11,000 submitted
users has 500 URLs indexed out of 1000 submittedAt a glance, you can tell that something is up with the products you're trying to sell and that Google isn't indexing that section very well, and you know to focus on that section, and maybe there's a bug in the code that put a noindex on most of the pages on accident.
Does that help?
-
A sitemap can help not only Google, but viewers find its way through your site. It is a great way to show the hierarchy and flow of your website. As mentioned, there are a few tools on the web that can help make this process pretty painless. At the end of the day, it can only help.
Hope that helps!
-
I agree to the benefits of having a sitemap on any website. Search for Google webmaster help on youtube. You can get to see a lot of supporting tutorials.
-
Hey Jonathan
A HTML sitemap can be useful for getting your site indexed and the XML one can also help with indexation but there are no guarantees that pages in the XML sitemap will be indexed. I read an article on here showing the indexation benefits of a sitemap and google have stated that they like you to have a HTML one for users as well as SEO so... it's like one of those 1% things, it may help a little bit, and it can't hurt but you still have to do everything else right.
Cheers
Marcus
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Will a Robots.txt 'disallow' of a directory, keep Google from seeing 301 redirects for pages/files within the directory?
Hi- I have a client that had thousands of dynamic php pages indexed by Google that shouldn't have been. He has since blocked these php pages via robots.txt disallow. Unfortunately, many of those php pages were linked to by high quality sites mulitiple times (instead of the static urls) before he put up the php 'disallow'. If we create 301 redirects for some of these php URLs that area still showing high value backlinks and send them to the correct static URLs, will Google even see these 301 redirects and pass link value to the proper static URLs? Or will the robots.txt keep Google away and we lose all these high quality backlinks? I guess the same question applies if we use the canonical tag instead of the 301. Will the robots.txt keep Google from seeing the canonical tags on the php pages? Thanks very much, V
Technical SEO | | Voodak0 -
How can I get the most out of uploading a print magazine to my client's website?
Hi Mozers, My client is just about to launch a print magazine for her watch business. There is so much valuable content in the magazine and we want to feature it on the website both for SEO purposes and also for those who prefer to read articles online instead of reading a physical magazine. My question is: what is the best method of displaying the magazine to get the most from search rankings and also to capitalise on the beautiful imagery from the magazine. The best option that I can think of is to upload the magazine as a flipbook and create a separate page on the website to display each article so that search engine crawlers can index the content. I do understand that this could be problematic if users are only spending time reading the flipbook and not so much time on the article pages. Do you guys have any suggestions about how to get the most out of this opportunity for my client? THANK YOU IN ADVANCE. Meaghan
Technical SEO | | StoryScout0 -
How to get out of Google's sendbox
Hello, i posted this question before here in forum, that 2 of my pages were sendboxed but never had a clear answer on how to get them back up, i do know that i need to build high quality backlinks pointing to those pages, but where do i start? Thanks
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
Javascript to manipulate Google's bounce rate and time on site?
I was referred to this "awesome" solution to high bounce rates. It is suppose to "fix" bounce rates and lower them through this simple script. When the bounce rate goes way down then rankings dramatically increase (interesting study but not my question). I don't know javascript but simply adding a script to the footer and watch everything fall into place seems a bit iffy to me. Can someone with experience in JS help me by explaining what this script does? I think it manipulates the reporting it does to GA but I'm not sure. It was supposed to be placed in the footer of the page and then sit back and watch the dollars fly in. 🙂
Technical SEO | | BenRWoodard1 -
Will changing our colocation affect our site's link juice?
If we change our site's server location to a new IP, will this affect anything involving SEO? The site name and links will not be changing.
Technical SEO | | 9Studios0 -
Access To Client's Google Webmaster Tools
Hi, What's the best/easiest way for a client to grant access to his Google Webmaster Tools to me? Thanks! Best...Michael
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed? In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered? This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
Technical SEO | | PGRob0