The importance of sitemaps

Posted by multippt

Sitemaps are underutilized despite being a valuable tool in getting as many pages indexed as possible. A primary reason is that it is difficult to generate sitemaps, and most sitemaps generate are specific to certain sites. If course, you can manually update a sitemap on your own, but that’s painstaking work as whenever you create a page, you need to edit the sitemap. But, Google is still recommending sitemaps despite its slow adoption.

With the increasing adoption of XML, most search engines decided to make use of XML for sitemaps as it is much easier to work with (for the search engine anyway). Hence, the most modern sitemap now commonly used are XML sitemaps.

Sitemaps increase indexing speed

It’s known how you can reduce the speed Google crawls your site, but what about the reverse? As Google said, sitemaps are used to get Google to reach into areas that it hasn’t found yet. But aside from that, it tells what pages have updated, prompting Google to index the newly updated pages.

It also tells how much Google should index the pages as well, and how often they are updated. By giving Google such information, Google can very well play into the way you want it to by giving priorities to the correct pages (e.g. making your main page way more important than some other page like the contact page).

Sitemaps also ensure that your content makes it to Google quickly, as Google regularly checks sitemaps for newly added links or updates. A nice bonus if you have a website that updates almost everyday.

Prompts Google to index “broken pages”

Sometimes, your pages may disappear temporarily, and unfortunately when Google finds that one of your many pages was declaring that it is a “missing page”, it will drop it after a few days. Pretty nasty ain’t it? Fortunately, sitemaps will tell the Googlebot straight on to index the missing pages, so as soon as you somehow restore the page, Google will re-include the page into the index in due time.

Include pages used in Flash

Thanks to Macromedia/Adobe Flash, we have some great snazzy sites that totally use Flash animations. Though, Google has a big problem crawling Flash sites - it simply can’t. A sitemap helps solve this by providing Google with pages that contain the text and stuff used in the Flash site.

Incomplete sitemaps?

Sitemaps work at its best when they cover as many pages as possible. However, you may not be able to get all pages up in the sitemap, because:
1. You have different areas in your site (e.g. forum, blog, etc.)
2. You have thousands of page to deal with, and a few of them may slip by

Fortunately, Google still go by with incomplete sitemaps. After all, weren’t you already fine without a sitemap to begin with? Google is able to build its index, and a sitemap is there to help it build much of it quickly.

An alternative to a XML sitemap?

XML sitemaps are much easier to handle by bots compared to HTML pages. But, if you can’t make an XML sitemap, you can always resort to the good old fashion sitemap used in 1996. This sitemap is simply a plain webpage containing links to almost every single page.

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Most sites do not have sitemaps, but they do help your site. Though, sitemaps are completely optional, and is not really needed for most sites.