Comments on: Site Maps, SEO Alchemy?

By: Funny tees

Funny tees — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:44:16 +0000

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.

By: Julian

Julian — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:23:48 +0000

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.)

By: Howard

Howard — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:13:29 +0000

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.

By: Ling

Ling — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 02:03:30 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:18:51 +0000

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.

By: Lloyd

Lloyd — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:02:32 +0000

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.