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
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
-
Would a Search Engine treat a sitemap hosted in the cloud in the same way as if it was simply on /sitemap.htm?
Mainly to allow updates without the need for publishing - would Google interpret any differently? Thanks
Technical SEO | | RichCMF0 -
What's with the redirects?
Hi there,
Technical SEO | | HeadStud
I have a strange issue where pages are redirecting to the homepage.Let me explain - my website is http://thedj.com.au Now when I type in www.thedj.com.au/payments it redirects to https://thedj.com.au (even though it should be going to the page https://thedj.com.au/payments). Any idea why this is and how to fix? My htaccess file is below: BEGIN HTTPS Redirection Plugin <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^home.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^photos.htm$ http://photos.thedj.com.au/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^contacts.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/contact-us/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^booking.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/book-dj/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^downloads.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/downloads/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^payonline.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/payments/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^price.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/pricing/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^questions.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/faq/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^links.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/links/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^thankyous/index.htm$ https://thedj.com.au/testimonials/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://thedj.com.au/ [L,R=301]</ifmodule> END HTTPS Redirection Plugin BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mrdj.net.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mrdj.net.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mrdj.com.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mrdj.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedjs.com.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.thedjs.com.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^theperthweddingdjs.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.theperthweddingdjs.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au/" [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^thedjs.net.au$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.thedjs.net.au$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "https://thedj.com.au" [R=301,L]0 -
The importance of url's - are they that important?
Hi Guys I'm reading some very contrasting and confusing reviews regarding urls and the impact they have on a sites ability to rank. My client has a number of flooring products, 71 to be exact - categorised under three sub categories 1. Gallery Wood - 2. Prefinshed Wood - 3. Parquet & Reclaimed. All of the 71 products are branded products (names that are completely unrelated to specific keyword search terms. This is having a major impact regarding how we optimise the site. FOR EXAMPLE: A product of the floor called "White Grain" - the "Key Word" we would like to rank this page for is Brown Engineered Flooring. I'm interested to know, should the name of the branded product match the url? What would you change to help this page rank better for the keyword - Brown Engineered Flooring. Title page: White Grain Url: thecompanyname.com/gallery-wood/white-grain (white grain is the name of the product) Key Word: Brown Engineered Flooring **Seo Title: **White Grain, Brown Engineered Flooring by X Meta Description: BLAH BLAH Brown Engineered Flooring BLAH BLAH Any feedback to help get my head around this would be really appreciated. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | GaryVictory0 -
How is this possible? A 200 response and 'nothing' to be seen? Need help!
On checking this website http://dogtraining.org.uk/ I get a 200 response. But an Oops! Google Chrome could not find dogtraining.org.uk . Same with Firefox (Server not found). Obviously there is a problem - I just don't know where to 'start' investigating to spot the error. Can someone help me? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | patrihernandez0 -
Webmaster Tools vs Screaming from for 404's
Hey guys, I was just wondering which is better to use to find the 404's effecting your site. I have been using webmaster tools and just purchased screaming frog which has given me a totally different list of 404's compared to WMT. Which do I use, or do I use both? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Adamshowbiz0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Schema Markup and Google's Rich Snippet Tool
Has anyone ever used the snippet tool and gotten the following error "could not fetch website"? When using the tool and placing an url that does not have markup present it will show that as the error. Or if part of markup is wrong, it will diagnose it accordingly. Did a search online and found limited info...one of which someone had this error but when other users tested it, they were not getting the same error.
Technical SEO | | andrewv0 -
How to show a 'We are now...' message for a rebrand and do a 301 redirect?
Our developer wants to use javascript, document referral or adding a URL parameter, in order to show a modal window telling them 'We are now...'. A cookie seems to be too much work. All of which don't play nice with the search engines. Do you know of a technique or method that allows us to be SEO friendly and still give a good user experience? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Pawngo0