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 plugins, 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. 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.