Remove sitemap, effect ranking?
-
We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap?
Thanks
-
Patrick has covered everything you need to know here, and most importantly, it wont hurt your rankings one bit.
-Andy
-
Hi there
No, it will not hurt your rankings for not having one. That being said, you should have one because it makes crawling your site easier for search engines and also helps inform them of any changes made to your website. If search engines offer you a hand, you should take it - sitemaps are a hand.
Sitemaps also make it so you're also not relying as heavily on search engines to find you from external links. This is important because if you don't have many backlinks pointing to your website, you're waiting on those sites to be crawled to find yours. Same concept with internal links - if you have broken internal links (which you shouldn't - you should be crawling regularly to check) and pages can't be found because of that, a sitemap can help search engines understand that the page does exist, even if internal links are broken.
I use them - they are worth the effort, you can do a lot with them, they are directly uploaded to both Google and Bing.
If I were you, I would look into generators so that you don't have to manual upload or edit your sitemap. If you have the wrong structure currently, have a generator will ensure that you do have the right structure and that it's up to date.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
Hi,
xml sitemap is not a ranking factor so it won't affect your current ranking. But an XML sitemap is necessary if you want to build a crawlable site. Each time you create a new page or edit an existing page you should update sitemap.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
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
-
.xml sitemap showing in SERP
Our sitemap is showing in Google's SERP. While it's only for very specific queries that don't seem to have much value (it's a healthcare website and when a doctor who isn't with us is search with the brand name so 'John Smith Brand,' it shows if there's a first or last name that matches the query), is there a way to not make the sitemap indexed so it's not showing in the SERP. I've seen the "x-robots-tag: noindex" as a possible option, but before taking any action wanted to see if this was still true and if it would work.
Technical SEO | | Kyleroe950 -
Ranking is dancing for 2 months
Hi, We have recently, https on website, all set perfectly. We also moved to php7 from 6. These two changes shouldn't harm our ranking, for keyword Virginia Beach, we used to show at first 5 position in Google.com. But for past 2 months ranking is dancing. This is insane. we have seen us on position #5 several times over the past few weeks, then it just disappears. website vabeach.com Your help will be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | irrfans40 -
Why is our login page ranked higher than our homepage?
Hello everyone, When you search "ProtonMail", our Login page always ranks #1 while our homepage ranks #2. We're unsure why this is happening. The PA for our homepage is higher than the login page, and the login page itself basically has zero content except for a login form. We don't want to put the login page on robots.txt, we want to do our best to preserve it so that people can login. However it still does not make sense to us how the login page ranks higher, even though it has a lesser PA. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | kevinzh0 -
Rankings for Google Play Pages
Hey all, I'm relatively new here and certainly new to posting in the forums and interacting with the community but I hope to be much more active in the coming months. I have what might be a silly question regarding search results for a Google Play store-specific query. The company in question has their main North American app that's been out for a month and a half and then an International version that was released just a few days ago. If you run a Google search (NOT a search witin Google Play) for 'Google Play Company Name' the more recent (but less used and ultimately less important, at least for the time being) International app is higher in the SERP than the more used and reviewed North American app. I'm guessing that this is something that will correct itself over the next week as the North American app establishes itself as the more important of the two, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask just in case there's something they can do to affect the results a little quicker. Any advice, input or just a verification of my guess would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | JDMcNamara0 -
Should I use these Meta Tags or Remove it?
Hi, I have a lot of older pages that I am cleaning up older pages, and I see that I have <title>Actual Title</title> (I understand the importance of this tag.) (I have some text in this meta tag on a lot of pages, sometimes matching my title tag exactly but in some cases I treated it like a mini description. Should I remove the on my pages, or keep it and make sure it is the exact as the main Title Tag. -------- Question about meta tag #2. I have heard rumors that the keywords tag should be removed. example: Thanks in advance! Force7
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Page rank and ranking down
Hi I blog at Technostarry. Some 3 months back during page rank update, my page rank went down from 3 to 2. I don't know the reason behind this. And now, my traffic and ranking is also down. I am not involved in any bad SEO practices, I don't copy paste and I write original content. I am too confused as why and what has happened with my site. If someone could analyze my blog and look at my weak points then that would be great. I would like to get any suggestions to get back my ranking and also page rank back. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | technotech0 -
Third Party Ranking Software
I have used a number of different tools for getting ranking information and have been using Cuterank but it now seems to be report the wrong results. Any suggestions for the best third party ranking software. It would allow me to check google, yahoo and bing ranks, compare month on month and produce branded PDFs. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
How to rank lower, fast....
Probably the complete opposite to all the questions asked on here before hehe One of my online stores is ranking in Google at no2 for a service we used to offer but no longer do as we do not have the contract anymore.We need to derank the listing as fast as we can we do not offer this service now. Normally we could just get google to deindex the page but it's the homepage we are ranking. It is ranking due to a good collection of exact match backlinks on. Have been trying to get our page off the first page for a couple of months but it appears that we did too good a job of getting it up there...it's not moving! Anyone have a suggestion please on how we can get off page one asap for this keyword without deindexing the homepage for our store? note: the keyword in question has not appeared on the site for a couple of months, removing that has had no impact on the ranking Thanks
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl1