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
-
What IS SEO FRIENDLY BEST PRACTICE FOR URLS FILTERED 'TAGGED'
EX: https://www.STORENAME.com/collections/all-deals/alcatel– Tagged "Alcatel", when I run audits, I come across these URLS that give me duplicate content and missing H1. This is Canonical: https://www.STORENAMEcom/collections/all-deals/alcatel Any advice on how to tackle these I have about4k in my store! Thank you
Technical SEO | | Sscha0030 -
What was the Google 'update' on 31st March?
Hi all. I looked back and saw that there was an update shown in 'Search Analytics' in Webmaster Tools a few weeks before the Mobile algorithm update. Not been able to find any mention of it and what it did so thought I'd check in here. ps. Also, this is a 90 day stretch and shows that our rankings have taken a hit since the mobile algorithm update. Interesting stuff (see image below) 4rJMU9e.jpg?1
Technical SEO | | RobFD0 -
Site Migration between CMS's
Hi There, I have a technical question about migrating CMS's but not servers. My client has site A on Joomla install, He want's ot migrate to Wordpress and we will call this site B. As he has a lot of old content on site A he doesn't want to lose, he has put site B (wordpress install) on a subdirectory site.com/siteb (for example). and will use a htaccess to forward the root domain to this wordpress site. Therefore anyone going to www.site.com will see the new wordpress site and the old content and joomla install will sit on the root of the server. Will Google have an issue with this? Will it even find the old content? what are the issues for the new site and new content? Look forward getting your guys input
Technical SEO | | nezona1 -
What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?
One of my client sites lists millions of products and 100s or 1000s are de-listed from their inventory each month and removed from the site (no longer for sale). What is the best way to handle these pages/URLs from an SEO perspective? There is no place to use a 301. 1. Should we implement 404s for each one and put up with the growing number of 'pages not found' shown in Webmaster Tools? 2. Should we add them to the Robots.txt file? 3. Should we add 'nofollow' into all these pages? Or is there a better solution? Would love some help with this!
Technical SEO | | CuriousCatDigital0 -
Unused url 'A' contains frameset - can it damage the other site B?
Client has an old unused site 'A' which I've discovered during my backlink research. It contains this source code below which frames the client's 'proper' site B inside the old unused url A in the browser address. Quick question - will google penalise the website B which is the one I'm optimising? Should the client be using a redirect instead? <frameset <span class="webkit-html-attribute-name">border='0' frameborder='0' framespacing='0'></frameset <span> <frame src="http: www.clientwebsite.co.ukb" frameborder="0" noresize="noresize" scrolling="yes"></frame src="http:> Please go to http://www.clientwebsite.co.ukB <noframes></noframes> Thanks, Lu.
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
How do SE's see abbreviated queries.
Do search engines pay attention to periods in abbreviated queries? If I use Mt. Bachelor all over my site, would SE's not rank my site well for queries that use Mt Bachelor?
Technical SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Sitemap Creation
Hi I am looking for the best way to generate an XML sitemap for webmaster tools for my website http://www.cheapfindergames.com. I have come across http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ but it only allows up to 500 links. Is there a PHP script that any experts could share that would create the XML map that I could upload please? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Domain Transfer Process / Bulk 301's Using IIS
Hi guys - I am getting ready to do a complete domain transfer from one domain to another completely different domain for a client due to a branding/name change. 2 things - first, I wanted to lay out a summary of my process and see if everyone agrees that its a good approach, and second, my client is using IIS, so I wanted to see if anyone out there knows a bulk tool that can be used to implement 301's on the hundreds of pages that the site contains? I have found the process to redirect each individual page, but over hundreds its a daunting task to look at. The nice thing about the domain transfer is that it is going to be a literal 1:1 transfer, with the only things changing being the logo and the name mentions. Everything else is going to stay exactly the same, for the most part. I will use dummy domain names in the explanation to keep things easy to follow: www.old-domain.com and www.new-domain.com. The client's existing home page has a 5/10 GPR, so of course, transferring Mojo is very important. The process: Clean up existing site 404's, duplicate tags and titles, etc. (good time to clean house). Create identical domain structure tree, changing all URL's (for instance) from www.old-domain.com/freestuff to www.newdomain.com/freestuff. Push several pages to a dev environment to test (dev.new-domain.com). Also, replace all instances of old brand name (images and text) with new brand name. Set up 301 redirects (here is where my IIS question comes in below). Each page will be set up to redirect to the new permanent destination with a 301. TEST a few. Choose lowest traffic time of week (from analytics data) to make the transfer ALL AT ONCE, including pushing new content live to the server for www.new-domain.com and implementing the 301's. As opposed to moving over parts of the site in chunks, moving the site over in one swoop avoids potential duplicate content issues, since the content on the new domain is essentially exactly the same as the old domain. Of course, all of the steps so far would apply to the existing sub-domains as well, IE video.new-domain.com. Check for errors and problems with resolution issues. Check again. Check again. Write to (as many as possible) link partners and inform them of new domain and ask links to be switched (for existing links) and updated (for future links) to the new domain. Even though 301's will redirect link juice, the actual link to the new domain page without the redirect is preferred. Track rank of targeted keywords, overall domain importance and GPR over time to ensure that you re-establish your Mojo quickly. That's it! Ok, so everyone, please give me your feedback on that process!! Secondly, as you can see in the middle of that process, the "implement 301's" section seems easier said than done, especially when you are redirecting each page individually (would take days). So, the question here is, does anyone know of a way to implement bulk 301's for each individual page using IIS? From what I understand, in an Apache environment .htaccess can be used, but I really have not been able to find any info regarding how to do this in bulk using IIS. Any help here would be GREATLY APPRECIATED!!
Technical SEO | | Bandicoot0