Comments on: What Is a Sitemap? Do I Need It?

By: ravi

ravi — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:49:18 +0000

I don’t have a sitemap myself, but I should get to work. Is a sitemap very important? Or just a little difference?

By: medyum

medyum — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:29:57 +0000

Well, I’d like to say that the XML Sitemap is really very useful to a blog, I have used it for nearly one year, the most pages of my first blog are indexed by Google, all thanks by Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress.

By: The Medical Plus

The Medical Plus — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:35:55 +0000

Building a good site map is also critical for web pages which use JavaScript menus, because most search engines cannot follow JavaScript links a Site Map will help those web pages to be indexed by the search engines.

By: Cristian

Cristian — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 05:37:13 +0000

That’s a great point about the sitemap possibly being a negative. I think there are three big benefits to a sitemap that I didn’t see mentioned here.

1) The last modified date should encourage the googlebot to crawl the page – even for small pages – to at least see what changed.

2) The sitemap priority to reduce the importance placed on less important pages (like a contact page) and also influence the links google will display in your authority listing (I think they call them sitelinks).

3) Having a sitemap allows you to ping Google, Yahoo, and MSN when you’ve updated your site. They may not crawl your site immediately, but it should get them back crawling your site sooner than if you had waited for the bots to come on their own.

Most good content management systems will take care of all three of these for you.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:35:37 +0000

I will always start a site with a sitemap now, but I have seen the negative effect to adding one with an older site.