Does sitemap auto generation help in SEO 2015

[omverma]

Dear All,

May be this is a common question in forum, but wanted to ask specifically for 2015. Does automatic site generators will help in SEO. I added a new website and google started crawling it, without adding sitemap.xml, So does it really matter to have sitemap or updating the sitemap.

Thanks,

Om

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Yes, you should definitely create a sitemap and upload it to both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. This will help crawlers understand your website structure, the importance of the pages, as well as how often those pages should be crawled.

I would also recommend building out sitemap extensions for other content:

• Images
• Video
• Mobile
• News

From there, you can collect all of your sitemaps so that crawlers know there are multiple sitemaps that need to be crawled for different content. Here are some more guidelines for you to go through and here is a resource from Google that lists sitemap generators that will not only generate, but maintain your sitemaps for you - I highly recommend this as it will lessen your workload but will make sure the work gets done and is up to date.

There are a lot of benefits and when done properly it can definitely help your organic visibility.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Om,

I recommend making your sitemap update daily (automatically). If you're using WordPress the SEO by Yoast plugin can do this for you. If you submit the URL to Google everything will go automatically. Manually changing is a real pain in the *** since every time a page disappears you should update your sitemap since this could cause you sending Google to 404 pages.

[omverma]

OK Got it. One more additional question, how frequently we should update the sitemap and submit to Google. One of our competitor changes their sitemap every day, does it help ?

Thanks,

Om

[Alick300]

Hi ,

IMO yes every site should have xml sitemap because it is a helpful tool that can improve the crawling of your site particularly if your site meets one of the following criteria:

1>Your site is really large.

2>Your site has a large archive of content pages that are isolated or well not linked to each other.

3>Your site is new and has few external links to it.

4>Your site uses rich media content, is shown in Google News, or uses other sitemaps-compatible annotations.

In most cases, webmasters benefit from sitemap submission, and in no case can you be penalized for it.

Hope this helps

Thanks

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi Omverma,

I totally agree with Hectormainar, sitemaps aren’t a must but I would definitely recommend them! Any website with a few levels (webshops for example) will have large amounts of deeper pages that are hard to get by through the internal link structure and a sitemap definitely helps with that.

Besides that, if you upload your sitemap in Google webmaster Tools you can get a quick view of how many pages Google has indexed. For me this is a quick indication of any indexation problems might going on.

I hope this helps!

[hectormainar]

It is not a must nowadays. As soon as you get some external links, bots will be able to start indexing them. But, sincerely, creating an automatic sitemap is an easy task, and for sure it speeds up the process of all the site appearing on the search engines, specially the deepest pages. Also, it is a way to index areas which are not accesible via links.

So, it is not the main goal in SEO, but is still recommended, specially for launching of new sites.