Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is having a site map page necessary?
-
Hello all!
So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap?
Thanks in advance!
-
-
As usual with most discussion regarding sitemap, you will see 99% of people recommending them provide not concrete, fact based reason as to any actual benefit it provides.
-
It provides no SEO advantage
-
The reason that it's useful to users is like saying my primary navigation system and search function is too difficult to use.
-
If you have a large website with lots of deep, frequently changing content, Google will recognize this and increase the crawl frequency and depth.
Sitemaps in my opinion or for the "tin foil hat" crowd.
But.. conversely, they don't hurt either. If you have a plugin or script that automatically runs over and over to update it for you, then one could legitimately say "Why not?"
There are some obscure reasons one might use - like adding a gazillion new pages to an otherwise small website and wanting to get them indexed sooner or later. But that's really the only one I can think of.
-
-
As long as you have a a sitemap XML included, I would not worry about having a sitemap page displayed on the actual website. It won't necessarily help you, but not having one won't hurt your results.
-
Myles92, recently (in the past few months, I don't recall specifically when) Google did give some recommendations that included having an html sitemap page on your website. For a good user experience, it is recommended that you have a good navigation structure as well as an "html sitemap". The html sitemap page allows users to see the overall structure of the website, and click through to a certain page or section of the site.
-
I honestly think it's not required anymore. There may be a benefit to a small site but I think it would be negligble.
-
Hi Myles,
Good question. The short answer is that it is not necessary for SEO if you have pages linked elsewhere (such as your menu and category pages), but it can be beneficial. The reason it can be good for SEO is to cover all the bases and make sure that even your least important posts and pages get some internal links to them and get crawled.
It can be a great resource for users to find things on your site. The main purpose of these pages is for users.
If your sitemap is going to be very massive I would consider using other navigation menus, sub-navigation menus or categories instead. Otherwise go ahead and add one.
Matt Cutts of Google has previously said that an HTML sitemap can be more beneficial than XML sitemaps for indexing. Both are recommended. Hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO efforts.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?
Hi I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google. Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!! Thanks
Web Design | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Dead end pages are really an issue?
Hi all, We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Site Migration due to Corporate Acquisition
Hey everyone, Wanted to check-in on something that I've been thinking way too much about lately. I'll do my best to provide background, but due to some poor planning, it is rather confusing to wrap your head around. There are currently three companies involved, Holding Corp (H Corp) and two operating companies, both in the same vertical but one B2B and the other is B2C. B2C corp has been pushed down the line and we're focusing primarily on H Corp and B2B brand. Due to an acquisition of H Corp and all of it's holdings, things are getting shuffled and Ive been brought in to ensure things are done correctly. What's bizarre is H Corp and it's web property are the dominant authority in SERPs for the B2B brand. As in B2B brand loses on brand searches to H Corp, let alone any product/service related terms. As such, they want to effectively migrate all related content from H Corp site to B2B brand site and handover authority as effectively as possible. Summary: Domain Migration from H Corp site to B2B Brand site. Ive done a few migrations in my past and been brought in to recover a few post-launch so I have decent experience and a trusted process. One of my primary objectives initially is change as little as possible with content, url structure (outside the root) etc so 301s are easy but also so it doesn't look like we're trying to play any games. Here's the thing, the URL structure for H Corp is downright bad from both a UX perspective and a general organizational perspective. So Im feeling conflicted and wanted to get a few other opinions. Here are my two paths as I see and Id love opinions on both: stick with a similar URL structure to H Corp through the migration (my normal process) but deviate from pretty much every best practice for structuring URLs with keywords, common sense and logic. Pro: follow my process (which has always worked in the past) Con: don't implement SEO/On-page best practices at this stage and wait for the site redesign to implement best practices (more work) Implement new URL structure now and deviate from my trusted process. Do you see a third option? Am I overthinking it? Other important details: B2B brand is under-going a site redesign, mostly aesthetic but their a big corporation and will likely take 6-9 months to get up. Any input greatly appreciated. Cheers, Brent
Web Design | | pastcatch1 -
Incorporating Spanish Page/Site
We bought an exact match domain (in Spanish) to incorporate with regular website for a particular keyword. This is our first attempt at this, and while we do have Spanish speaking staff that will translate/create a nice, quality page, we're not going to redo everything in Spanish page. Any advice on how to implement this? Do I need to create a whole other website in Spanish? Will that be duplicate content if I do? Can I just set it up to show the first page in Spanish, but if they click on anything else it redirects to our site? I'm pretty clueless on this, so if anything I've suggested is off-the-wall or a violation, I'm really just spit-balling, trying to figure out how to implement this. Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Average Time to Conversion on Site
I am curious to know if there is a way to view or calculate the average time it takes site visitors to convert per session. For example, based on a current website design, the average time on site might be 3 minutes and the number of conversions might be 100. is there a way to say that for the current website design, it takes 3 minutes for the average site visitor to submit a web form? Then, as I redesign the site, my goal would be to improve the average time to conversion by making the web form more accessible and require less information within the form itself. I don't think this is currently possible in GA. Has anyone figured out a way to accomplish this by use of traditional tracking tools? Or, am I facing having to code my site to record each visitor's time on site from the second they enter and then stop the clock when they submit the form?
Web Design | | dsinger0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site
My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?
Web Design | | DownPour0