Comments on: Site Maps, SEO Alchemy?

By: Ben @ Recruit SEO

Ben @ Recruit SEO — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:43:15 +0000

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.

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.