Are Google Sitemaps a Must-Have SEO Help Tool?
By Terry Heath · Print This Article
If I asked you to come to Seattle and meet me in a little cafe I like, would you attempt the journey without some sort of map or set of directions? Not if you intended to actually find the place. Sure, you might come to town anyway and take in a few of the obvious landmarks, like the Space Needle or the Waterfront. But unless I tell you where that special little cafe resides, or at least its name, just how would you find the right place?
Google seems to feel the same way about visiting our blogs. Sure, Google is likely to pay your blog a visit. It is likely to add a few of your pages to its famous index. But how is Google going to know about all those special little nooks and crannies in your blog unless you provide some sort of map?
The answer is simple, Google won’t.
But unless you have lots of time on your hands and a fluent understanding of XML (the language Google expects a map to be written in), it isn’t likely you will want to build a map for Google (or any of the other search engines, for that matter). Then there’s the task of updating the map everytime you add a new post or make any tiny change.
But never fear, Arne Brachhold’s Google XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress is here. This plugin generates an XML-Sitemap, supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search (Google came up with XML sitemaps in 2005 and the others later adopted them, hence the often-used name “Google Site Map”).
A sitemap allows search engines like Google and Yahoo to index the pages of your blog more efficiently. While a sitemap isn’t imperative, and search engines will find many of your pages through internal links on your blog, you site may not be fully indexed (each entry listed with the search engines) without one.
Once you have installed the plugin and built your sitemap, the plugin will keep the sitemap updated whenever needed. I also recommend you allow the plugin to create a robots.txt file for you, but more on that some other time.
This is where many people will tell you how to submit your sitemap to Google, but a little bird named Lorelle VanFossen let me know sitemaps are now autodiscoverable. She said:
“In case you missed the news, Google’s Webmaster Central announced that in accordance with the new Sitemap.org, you do not have to submit your XML sitemap to Google or other search engines any more. Instead, you can make your sitemap ‘autodiscoverable’ by directing the visiting web crawler to the location of the sitemap.”
Webcrawlers will be directed to your blog’s sitemap through your robots.txt file, so be sure to let the plugin you’ve installed create that file for you.
Now that I’ve convinced you to run out and create a sitemap, pronto-like, you should know not everyone agrees to their importance. Check out Garry Conn’s post “Search Engine Sitemaps” and decide for yourself. For more information about adding one, read Ryan’s earlier search engine sitemap article here on SEONoobs.
What do you think?
This is really helpful. Thanks! I am going to add a site map to my blog today. Thanks, this my first comment here. I found out about your blog from the SEO section of Alltop.
Mike’s last blog post..Mix-of-the-Month: TheSPRINGTeam
Well, I certainly ain’t no expert or nuthin’…
But Big G is good enough to me that I’d probably stand on my head for awhile each day if they asked me to…
And I register all my sites with G’s Webmaster Central, including both verification of ownership and a sitemap.
It doesn’t seem an overwhelming commitment.
And, with the announcement of the new Robots.txt tool from Google, I’m glad to be able to skip the extra step of adding sitemaps to the entry for each site I register at GWC.
Chuck’s last blog post..American Idol: The Top 10
@Mike: Glad you found it helpful. And welcome to SEONoobs! Of course I hope you’ll return, but doesn’t that go without saying?
@Chuck: Hey! I thought I’d lost you. So glad to see you in the comments again. I still have a voice over project brewing in the back of my mind . . .
@Terry: I’m back! ps. I love the CommentLuv last post feature in the comments. That is so cool. I’m going to have to figure out how to do that, I would assume that it is not available on blogger blog’s though….I will look into it, thanks.
Mike’s last blog post..Mix-of-the-Month: TheSPRINGTeam
@Mike: Welcome back! CommentLuv is a WordPress plugin . . . maybe it’s time you made the switch to WordPress?
I just recently setup that plugin for my WordPress blog…still waiting for the results on it. It does auto update the sitemap every time I post which is really great. I had to tweak it a bit to get Google webmaster tools to accept it. the sitemap has to be in the root directory of the website and I had my blog in a sub folder. Plus if you have another sitemap, like I do, you need to name it something different or the WordPress one will overwrite it. CoffeCup’s Google Sitemapper is a great program if you aren’t using the WordPress plugin.
@Hetzel: That’s an interesting point about the subfolder setup. I do have one blog set up that way . . . now I need to check if the sitemap is working properly!
Which Google Webmaster tools were in conflict?
A Google Sitemap is definetely not a must have. If your internal linking structure is build up the right way, spiders can find all the pages they need to find. A sitemap becomes useful when you want to index a 750+ pages website.
Bobbink SEO Blog’s last blog post..Wat heb je aan topposities in Live en MSN search?
Nice post, I’ll come and meet you for a coffee ;o) I like the new layout too.
A sitemap is something on my list of to do’s and its just been highlighted ;o)
@Bobbink: One of the great things about the SEO world is its diversity of opinion. It would be interesting to be able to study the difference between a site with and a site without a sitemap, and to measure how well each is indexed. But that would be difficult to pull of since so many other factors would come into play. In the meantime, it seems to be working for me, and if it ain’t broken I ain’t gonna fix it.
@MMB: Name the place, bud!
@Terry: I am considering it, although most my blogging community uses blogger.
Mike’s last blog post..Mix-of-the-Month: TheSPRINGTeam
@Mike: I know that can be rough. Most of the people who frequent my creative writing blog are on Blogger. They’re not too worried about things like backlinks, so they don’t mind the nofollow comments.
I guess it really only matters if you’re getting many readers from Blogger’s browsing feature.
I submit sitemaps to Yahoo and MSN (these two seem to REALLY prefer sites with sitemaps), but I have stopped submitting sitemaps to Google.
I found that Google rarely crawled my sites when I used a sitemap, preferring, of course, just to read the sitemap.
That’s great for indexing content, but there are important elements of a page that aren’t included in a sitemap. Header text, internal nav links with crucial anchor text, etc.
The sitemap just lets Google get lazy, imo. I believe that I get higher quality crawls without it.
[...] Are Google Sitemaps a Must For SEO a very interesting read. [...]
sitemap is very important for any site, with this help most of search engine will easly crawl and indexing most of your website page.