Skip navigation
newsletter signup

Usefulness of Adding a Sitemap

December 13, 2006

Hello Jill,

 

I’ve been told that adding a site map to our website increases the chance of
search engines linking to other pages in our site. Any truth to this?
Neither of our sites have a site map.

 

Most sincerely,

 

Phil

 

++Jill’s Response++

 

Hi Phil,

 

That’s sort of a confused version of the truth.  If the engines don’t seem
to have all the pages of your site in their databases, a sitemap might help
them find and add them.  But as long as your site navigation is such that
the engines can crawl through it fine, the sitemap really isn’t necessary.


However, if you have a very large site, sitemaps can be very helpful to both
your site visitors and the search engines.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Jill

del.icio.us
 
Email a FriendPrintRSSPost Comment Related Articles» Related Forum Posts»
 
Post Comment

 Nat Turner said:
Comment @ 12/13/06 at 11:00 pm

Hi Jill,

I think maybe Phil is refering not to the classic sitemaps that are visible to the visitors, but e.g. Google Sitemaps, which are xml files not visible to anyone but the crawlers. And, about the latter, I have wondered whether they are just some kind of Google experiment, or whether they help my site.
There is one situation in which they are particularly useful - landing pages used for example in AdWords that are not linked FROM the home page.
 Jill said:
Comment @ 12/13/06 at 11:07 pm  

Hi Nat,

Either way, it’s not necesssary unless you’re having problems.

That said, many people like the reporting features you get with a Google sitemap. I haven’t personally found a need to use them though, so I can’t say for sure.

Jill
 DJM said:
Comment @ 12/14/06 at 4:50 pm

The Google Sitemaps tool has been recently updated to point out ALL the errors the Google-Bot has with your website. This is incredibly useful data as it points out problems you may not even be aware of when you get the list of pages with errors.

Just to repeat. It points out ALL crawling errors, not just mistakes that may have been in the pages listed in the sitemap.

I can’t imagine anyone with a large website not using this tool.
 Tom Ender said:
Comment @ 07/25/07 at 6:05 am

Well, we have a new site and we used xml sitemap which we uploaded to google webmasters every day (also added new pages every day)… and as a results… GoogleBot Index Pages faster and Visits the site more often.

Tom

Add Your Comments