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
-
Video sitemap
Hello, I'm no Wordpress developer so need a little help please. I have manually created a video sitemap. It needs to be uploaded to the website. Where should the .xml file be uploaded onto Wordpress? Which directory? Is it Ok to add the code to a notepad file and upload? I'm trying to avoid the plugin route if possible. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Redirect 'keyword-url' to improve ranking?
I was wondering if a good url, with a keyword in it, can help you improve the position of that certain keyword by redirecting that url to your website. To make it clear: We run the website www.terello.nl, and have the possibility to let the url www.iphonereparatie.nl (translation: iphonerepair) redirect to our website. Would this help us to rank for the keyword 'iPhone reparatie'? I hope that I made myself clear this way:) Otherwise i'm more than happy to clearify myself!
Technical SEO | | Jan-Peter0 -
GWT returning 200 for robots.txt, but it's actually returning a 404?
Hi, Just wondering if anyone has had this problem before. I'm just checking a client's GWT and I'm looking at their robots.txt file. In GWT, it's saying that it's all fine and returns a 200 code, but when I manually visit (or click the link in GWT) the page, it gives me a 404 error. As far as I can tell, the client has made no changes to the robots.txt recently, and we definitely haven't either. Has anyone had this problem before? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | White.net0 -
Robots.txt and Multiple Sitemaps
Hello, I have a hopefully simple question but I wanted to ask to get a "second opinion" on what to do in this situation. I am working on a clients robots.txt and we have multiple sitemaps. Using yoast I have my sitemap_index.xml and I also have a sitemap-image.xml I do put them in google and bing by hand but wanted to have it added into the robots.txt for insurance. So my question is, when having multiple sitemaps called out on a robots.txt file does it matter if one is before the other? From my reading it looks like you can have multiple sitemaps called out, but I wasn't sure the best practice when writing it up in the file. Example: User-agent: * Disallow: Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap_index.xml Sitemap: http://sitename.com/sitemap-image.xml Thanks a ton for the feedback, I really appreciate it! :) J
Technical SEO | | allstatetransmission0 -
Different IP's in one Server
Hi, I just want to ask if there is no bad effect in SEO if we do have different websites that has different IP address but has shared in only 1 server? Thank you
Technical SEO | | TirewebMarketing0 -
Just relaunched a website - why did it fall in Google's SERPs?
I work for a marketing agency that just redesigned, rewrote and relaunched a client's website. They used to rank #4 on Google for the company's name (which is a fairly common one, for what it's worth). Now they're at #10 and want to know why. I'd like to explain to them what happened but don't know myself. Can someone explain it to me? And can I tell them if/when their ranking might go back up? In case this matters, I can tell you that it looks like Google hasn't yet crawled the new site. Anyway, thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Technical SEO | | matt-145670 -
Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot
Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
Technical SEO | | aethereal
Asim0 -
Are 301s advisable for low-traffic URL's?
We are using some branded terms in URLs that we have been recently told we need to stop using. If the pages in question get little traffic, so we're not concerned about losing traffic from broken URLs, should we still do 301 redirects for those pages after they are renamed? In other words, are there other serious considerations besides any loss in traffic from direct clicks on those broken URLs that need to be considered? This comes up because we don't have anyone in-house that can do the redirects, so we need to pay our outside web development company. Is it worth it?
Technical SEO | | PGRob0