A site map seems like a really good idea, but if WordPress is on your team, you are already in great shape, and they offer no real benefit.
I read with interest Adam Freetly’s Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins and the discussion around it on weblog tools collection and other sites. It is a great list of plugins1, but I have a problem with one of the plugins on the list, or the claims that people make about it anyway:
Google Sitemap Generator – The biggest benefit of using wordpress is the manual labor you save because the software already knows where all of your content is. This Plugin submits a comprehensive index of your site to google, yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask.com every time you update your site. It’s a huge boost to your site’s SEO. by Arne Brachhold
In my experience working with numerous clients, I’ve seen no benefit of having a site map, and the claim that it provides a huge boost to your site’s SEO is hollow.
If it does provide such a boost surely many people would have data to support this. I’ve seen nothing that supports these claims to my satisfaction.
Looking at sitemaps.org, the site sponsored by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft for this topic, the front page reads (emphasis mine):
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.
Reading more of the limited material on the site, the scenarios where a site map is most helpful is for a site where the content isn’t well linked, ie a bot can’t spider through all of your content. Sites where this is a problem are fundamentally broken, and you should look to change your information architecture or web site software (CMS). WordPress doesn’t suffer from this problem.
Sure, the search engines (Google in particularly) loves as much data as you will feed them.
As I said, in my experience a site map has provided no benefit to web traffic.2 In fact, people would scream blue murder if it, because search engines would be requiring sites to be constructed in a special way, instead of web site creators focusing on their content, and search engines focusing on returning the most relevant results.
I have tested Arne Brachhold’s Google Sitemap Generator and it is an excellent, well written plugin. No question about that. But it is still one more think that has to be installed, configured, maintained, and is not without overhead.
I’m filing this one, SEO alchemy.
- I’ve added Blueprint Design Studios’s blog to my reader. [↩]
- In theory, a previously stealth site with a lot content created for launch could benefit from a site map, because it notifies the search engines of all the content. On the other hand, a few links from the rest of the web, and it will soon be in regular rotation. [↩]
Comments (10)
There is a very good reason for blogs to support the sitemap protocol (which is an update to robots.txt) and that is page ranking within your own site. It’s common to have blog entries on the home page, and have a “post page” for each post. With the sitemap protocol you can tell search engines which page has a higher preference in results – i.e. a search turns up matches for your homepage and you post page, you can tell the search engine to link to the post page. This makes for a better experience for the reader – how many times have you searched for something, clicked the link, only to realize that post is no longer on the home page and now you have to search the blog for it?
Its the truth, using Wordpress rocks!!
SEO is entirely pseudoscience.
A regularly updated sitemap will prompt google, MSN, and yahoo! to crawl your site more often. If you link to your sitemap, it also ensures that no matter what, your site is no more than 2 links deep. And, as Michael said, you can tune the relative weight of your posts, and especially category/tag/date/author archive pages. You’re right, though, I’m light on actual stats for the benefit of a sitemap.
Thanks for the comment Adam. As you know, I’m a big fan of your work!
Pseudoscience is a great term for it, though there is a whole spectrum from alchemy to real science of SEO. Unfortunately most practitioners are selling snake oil or worse are spammers. The good ones provide references directly from the search engine companies and data to back up their claims. For the most part the search engines (Google’s Matt Cutts and team particularly) are very generous with providing recommendations, of course. There are no secrets to SEO.
Although, search engines love more data, and want to play even nicer with sites that provide that, they really can’t if it doesn’t support their main goal of showing the most relevant content. A sitemap prompts the search engines, getting the site back into the crawler queue — but without any special positioning — and this will help sites with orphaned pages, but if that is the case, they are better to evaluate their information architecture.
All the articles about Google Sitemap Generator seem to be install and forget articles — instant benefits. I would love to see articles of how people have tweaked the relative weight and the benefits for their WordPress powered site, and how that is better than other solutions.
I’ve never seen results from using a site map. Indexing is no better and crawl rate is no faster. You’re better off just making sure you have a great internal linking structure and let the crawler do its thing.
Don’t see what you need a sitemap for, on a blog. Google gets notified of new posts as soon as you click publish, and a couple of minutes later, your post starts showing up in search results.
In fact, I’d say that it would cause more of a problem than be a benefit, cause if your site structure and relationship with google is such that the wrong pages are showing up for results, you need to correct the problem, rather than hiding it by using a sitemap to tell google which page it should show.
In general terms a sitemap is very useful where site navigation is poor on sites NOT using Wordpress – creating a sitemap with Arne Brachhold (non-Wordpress) software will help the google bots to spider your site.
I suspect that pages found this way may work for long tail keywords.
I am not convinced that a sitemap on Wordpress Blogs is essential; wordpress is well structured and the bots should find it easy to spider the site. Using PING for new pages should keep Google and others aware of new pages.
When Sitemaps was first published, I expressed similar doubts. (Later, Alister Cameron did too.)
However, after more thinking, I came to a similar conclusion to Michael C. Neel, above. That sitemaps could be beneficial in pointing people away from your rapidly changing homepage, towards the relevant permalink post.
(I use Arne Brachhold’s plugin after surveying the competition in Sep 2005.)
I can see the benefit of having a sitemap, but SEO is a hot topic for me and it does not seem to have a possitive impact so I am not sure that I care much about this feature. I have heard allot about sitemaps recently but I was interested to read this post.
The funny thing is about the sitemap debate is that it is designed to promote indexing and site access but what we don’t want is for a situation where the search engines become reliant on this and lazy. Needless to say, there is an argument to be had about encouraging a search engine to crawl the site more naturally (especially as not all people generate sitemaps accurately).
Cheers.