Do Seomozers recommend sitemaps.xml or not. I'm thoroughly confused now. The more I read, the more conflicted I get

[catherine-279388]

I realize I'm probably opening a can of worms, but here we go.  Do you or do you not add a sitemap.xml to a clients site?

[MagicDude4Eva]

Go with a sitemap. Hint it via robots.txt and use a Gzipped SitemapIndex (not a plain sitemap). Make sure that your index files do not contain more than 50,000 URLs.

Verify that whatever you submit in the sitemap-index files is not blocked by robots.txt or onpage noindex-tags.

[SimonCullum]

Hi Catherine

It's still considered good practice to include a sitemap.xml though not always essential.

It's debatable as to whether or not it actually brings benefit to do so (likely does in some cases such as for dynamic sites and new sites) though as Webmaster Tools still has the facility to receive sitemap.xml files through a submission, is usually good to spend a little time creating one. One more tick in the box for on-site SEO.

A good read on this topic can found at  http://www.brilliantthinking.net/2012/05/22/benefits-of-a-google-xml-sitemap/

Hope that helps,

Simon

[Marcus_Miller]

Yep, in most cases, as long as they are done well. There was a lady on here a week or so ago that was submitting a site map with nearly 250,000 duplicate URLs and in that instance, I would probably say drop it if you can't fix it.

But, in ordinary cases, if your sitemap is well aligned with the pages on your site and if you have duplicate URLs and canonical urls and it only features the correct canonical it can certainly increase indexation and subsequently unique URLs that are sending traffic.

We have also seem some great indexation and results from video and multi page sitemaps.

Another plus point is if you do have problems with pages you submit, you will get some feedback in webmaster tools when the pages show as 'not selected' which again can be a useful bit of diagnostic information.

So, in most cases, sitemaps get a thumbs up from me.

Marcus