Comments on: XML Sitemaps: The Most Overrated SEO Tactic Ever

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:21:47 +0000

I’m calling “context” on this one. In a lot of cases, yes, they’re overrated. Nothing beats “natural crawlability” (love the phrase, btw!). BUT- If you build dynamic websites via a CMS, and your organization is adding / updating pages all the time, having a list of “This one got updated, this one got updated, this one got created” that a spider can look at and go straight to the new stuff means that it won’t waste YOUR bandwidth by crawling your entire 10,000+ page site when only 20 pages have been updated since the last crawl. It also means that those 20 pages WILL get analyzed the next time Google visits your site, in case the spider is set to only crawl, say, 1,000 site pages per visit.
I’ve noticed an honest net positive effect of xml sitemaps, in that new pages get indexed much faster using them (I have mine set to be automatically generated upon request for all my clients, so any call to the sitmap gets a completely fresh snapshot of the website).

I’m not discounting your rankings-drop experience, however. While I never experienced that, evidence does point to it being the result of an xml sitemap issue on your part. I do wonder if google crawls the sitemap instead of links on the site pages, instead of “in addition to”… Something that will hopefully be answered in the google group.

By: R.A.

R.A. — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:48:35 +0000

Sorry, my last Reply has a slight typo error in the 2nd sentence, which should read: …and it would NOT take too much of the time.

By: R.A.

R.A. — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:44:32 +0000

I originally thought no seo professional with logical thinking would disagree with Matt,but in fact a lot of others still said: Why not? It is a recommeneded seo practice by SE and it would take too much of the time.
I also found that a few of these kinds of seo practices are just useless, such as the Revisit tag, Google never follows this tag - it certainly has its own alogrithm to determine how frequent it would browse a site for update!

By: Donace

Donace — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:29:50 +0000

As stated earlier an interesting discussion; though in my opinion if the SE’s dont find your site and the pages by themselves it just means they are not worth being found.

The best way to get found is to write great content and let people know. Marketing is key

By: Relationship Adviser

Relationship Adviser — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:26:27 +0000

By the way, Matt, I wonder if you would consider writing more articles on those controversial subjects, such as duplicate contents (especially I have read that google would consider http://www.youdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com and are duplicate contents (or sites?)) In that case, all professional seo should be a standard procedure to choose between http://www. and no http://www. and do some sort of redirect or what best in the very very beginning when hosting a site.
I seldom see it in any recommended seo practice.

Thanks in advance.

By: Relationship Adviser

Relationship Adviser — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 17:15:49 +0000

I totally agreed with what Matt said is absolutely right.

I have experience which I also believe all should have the same that even the sitemap contains 100 pages, google would not index all the pages if those pages are not properly optimized.

As very well said by Matt: “The solution to getting those 75 pages indexed isn’t to spoon-feed them to the search engine…” and certainly it would NOT do the job by using sitemaps.

Thanks to Matt for his great and bold advice.

By: Chicago Blog

Chicago Blog — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:04:33 +0000

Interesting discussion. I was worried that by not having an XML sitemap on my blogs, i was losing out on something special.

But i see now it is not a big issue. This article has alleviated some concerns. Plus i wouldn’t know what to do with crawl problems anyway. Anothing blogging technicality to look into, “crawling and indexing problems”. Maybe you can write a how-to post on this, Matt.

I’d be happy to provide you my GWT crawl results for you to do a case study on. Just let me know.

By: Macy

Macy — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:48:21 +0000

There has been so much talk about using a sitemap to help google help you, so I went with it. There are usually too many variables involved to determine the direct effect of any particular change, but I noticed an increase in indexed pages at the time.

By: WP PL

WP PL — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:30:41 +0000

“Let the spiders keep doing what they’re doing; let them crawl through your pages”

I agree with that. I never used sitemaps, instead I prefer to optimize internal linking. If necessary I like to use an “onsite sitemap” on a sepreate page or in the footer, which also serves as an overview for users (even though most users don’t pay attention to footer links).

By: Rahil

Rahil — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:57:49 +0000

Well, what happened to your friend’s blog is vry intresting.

but the topic is debatable. can the topic of fixing the “crawlability” problem without using sitemap discussed here! that would take the discussion towards solving the problem!