Web experts have long debated whether or not having a sitemap for your website is actually beneficial. They’re easy and free to create. And while they may not dramatically boost your Google search ranking, they don’t hurt it, either. Plus, they don’t consume any natural resources, so they’re awesome for the environment.
“What is a sitemap?” you may be wondering. Basically, it’s a map search engine “crawlers” use to navigate their way around your site. That map contains the page structure of your site, a list of all the pages, and when the pages were updated. It helps these crawlers determine whether or not they’ve already indexed a given page and why they should index any new pages.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. Here’s why you should consider having an XML sitemap for your website.
First, let’s reiterate a previous statement: it’s easy and free to have one. There are a number of online tools that can help you create the .xml file, which you can upload to the root directory of your site. If you routinely update your site, make sure you routinely update your .xml file as well so that the crawlers find the most up-to-date info.
Secondly, it’s very easy to discredit sites in a web crawler’s eyes. If you:
- have too many links pointing to a certain page
- don’t have enough relevant content in a page
- stuffed your pages with keywords
- don’t have enough links that are relevant to the web at large
then search engines can strip those pages of importance. A sitemap, however, can inform web crawlers that pages – despite their seeming lack of importance – are, in fact, quite relevant. The map can tell search engines that pages are not only important, but that the crawlers should visit them often.
Furthermore, each time a search engine crawls a site, it doesn’t index every page. XML sitemaps tell search engines which pages they have and haven’t searched, allowing the engines to browse the content they haven’t previously discovered during a visit. While this isn’t beneficial for Google rankings, it helps get the pages indexed faster.
As you can see, having an XML sitemap doesn’t optimize your site’s search engine rankings by great measures, but it’s so easy to incorporate and such a supplemental SEO treasure that it may do more harm than good long term to avoid having it.
