Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Is having a sitemap.xml file still beneficial?

3

3

2046

Log in to reply

davieshussein last edited by

Hi,

I'm pretty new to SEO and something I've noticed is that a lot of things become relevant and irrelevant like the weather.

I was just wondering if having a sitemap.xml file for Google's use is still a good idea and beneficial?

Logically thinking, my websites would get crawled faster by having one.

Cheers.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Tompt last edited by

It's worth looking at the Webinar video on Sitemaps for this one. It's just a month old so it's completely up to date.

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/getting-value-from-xml-sitemaps

Sitemaps aren't just a case listing every page on your site anymore, they require a bit of thought and attention.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1
eseyo last edited by

Absolutely relevant, infact i'd say essential.

A great article posted on the site already here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xml-sitemaps-guidelines-on-their-use
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Does Google still use Meta descriptions?

I've noticed that Google is not using my Meta description in the SERP results but rather text from my page, it seems to be a similar situation with a couple of the other sites in the same search results. Does anyone know why this would be?
Technical SEO | | OUTsurance

0
What would cause a sudden drop in indexed sitemap pages?

I have made no changes to my site for awhile and on 7/14 I had a 20% drop in indexed pages from the sitemap. However my total indexed pages has stayed the same. What would cause that?
Technical SEO | | EcommerceSite

0
Is there still a fold, Virginia. Or has scroll taken away the need?

Some people have declared the ‘fold’ dead because people scroll. Others using eye tracking studies hold that most attention is "still be focused on the top of pages. 80.3% of users attention was focused on above the fold (top 600-800 pixels). The case becomes especially strong with mobile devices. It is more inconvenient than ever to see content far down the page when looking at a screen that ranging from 3.5″-5″. Opinons?
Technical SEO | | jgodwin

0
Delete or re-submit sitemaps for new products? How often?

When I add new products (approx. 10 a month), I usually delete the old sitemap and submit a new one. Is this ok to do, or should I just re-submit it with the new info included? Also, is once a month too much?
Technical SEO | | tiffany1103

0
Question about construction of our sitemap URL in robots.txt file

Hi all, This is a Webmaster/SEO question. This is the sitemap URL currently in our robots.txt file: http://www.ccisolutions.com/sitemap.xml As you can see it leads to a page with two URLs on it. Is this a problem? Wouldn't it be better to list both of those XML files as separate line items in the robots.txt file? Thanks! Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo

0
Sitemap for pages that aren't on menus

I have a site that has pages that has a large number, about 3,000, pages that have static URLs, but no internal links and are not connected to the menu. The pages are pulled up through a user-initiated selection process that builds the URL as they make their selections, but,as I said, the pages already exist with static URLs. The question: should the sitemap for this site include these 3,000 static URLs? There is very little opportunity to optimize the pages in any serious kind of way, if you feel that makes a difference. There is also no chance that a crawler is going to find its way to these pages through the natural flow of the site. There isn't a single link to any of these pages anywhere on the site. Help?
Technical SEO | | RockitSEO

0
Wordpress Robots.txt Sitemap submission?

Alright, my question comes directly from this article by SEOmoz http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/r... Yes, I have submitted the sitemap to google, bing's webmaster tools and and I want to add the location of our site's sitemaps and does it mean that I erase everything in the robots.txt right now and replace it with? <code>User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/none-standard-location/sitemap.xml</code> <code>???</code> because Wordpress comes with some default disallows like wp-admin, trackback, plugins. I have also read this, but was wondering if this is the correct way to add sitemap on Wordpress Robots.txt. [http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-...](http://www.seomoz.org/q/removing-robots-txt-on-wordpress-site-problem) I am using Multisite with Yoast plugin so I have more than one sitemap.xml to submit Do I erase everything in Robots.txt and replace it with how SEOmoz recommended? hmm that sounds not right. like <code> <code>
<code>User-agent: *
Disallow: </code> Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml</code> <code>``` Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sub/sitemap_index.xml ```</code> <code>?????????</code> ```</code>
Technical SEO | | joony2008

0
Video Sitemaps - Clarification Needed

I'm trying to make sense of video sitemaps so I can get one up and going but the set up seems unclear. We currently have 7 videos created and up on Youtube. I've got them embedded on the site to a "Video" landing page as well as having these product demo videos embedded on appropriate product detail pages. So when setting up the video sitemap it looks like I'll be using the video:player_loctag as opposed to video:content_locbecause I'm not linking to the file itself but rather a page it's hosted on. Correct? Additionally I'm adding the product detail page url here, not Youtube right? Lastly, do I need to insert an autoplay piece on the videos on the product detail page? I feel that would be an annoying user experience.</video:content_loc></video:player_loc> So part of my sitemap might look like this... <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=[?]">http://website/ProductDetailURL</video:player_loc>
Technical SEO | | dgmiles

0