First, SEOmoz advised against Google Sitemaps:

It sounds bizarre, almost counterintuitive, but many of best minds in the world of SEO appear to be rallying around the idea that submitting a feed to Google Sitemaps and Yahoo! Site Explorer is actually a terrible idea. The logic behind the practice is simple, if you follow the steps:

1. Without sitemaps, a search engine visits your site’s pages through links on and off the site, indexing and ranking those pages it deems worthy of being indexed and ranked.
2. When a search engine crawls your site and fails to index particluar pages, you have a signal from the engines that those pages lack the necessary components for inclusion, be they architectural, link strength, content-related, etc.
3. Sitemaps enables search engine to crawl and index pages that they might not ordinarily include in a normal crawl process.
4. If a page lacks the link juice, internally or externally, or has content that engines wouldn’t normally deem worthy of indexing, Sitemaps may overlook these weaknesses and include those pages in their indices.

As you can see, it’s not so much that he’s advising against, but thata he’s saying many SEOs are advising against it. Maybe there’s a reason why SEO’s would say Sitemaps aren’t necessary. On the other hand, WebProNews says differently:

Now, Rand isn’t someone I’d categorize as a tin-foil hat wearing, conspiracy theorist loon (well not all of those anyway) and he has had a fair share of supportive comments on this issue from SEO luminaries like RustyBrick and David Naylor. Nonetheless, I still have a problem thinking of a sitemap as a negative thing. Unless there is some sort of value differentiation between naturally indexed and sitemap-assisted indexed content (which I doubt), the argument falls a bit flat I think.

Now, bear in mind that the author of the above paragraph, Mike McDonald, by his own admission, is not an SEO. Rather, he’s a journalist:

While I am certainly not an expert SEO (disclaimer for Diggers), I don’t think the sitemap is going to somehow keep you from identifying these problems. Maybe you have to look for problems beyond: ‘is the page indexed (yes/no)’ but I just don’t buy into the concept of the sitemap as a negative for SEO in all but the wildest of exceptions.

So what does Mr. McDonald do to justify his case that a Sitemap isn’t a negative? Like any self-respecting journalist, he listens to both sides of the argument. The other side of this argument happens to be a Google respresentative, Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google’s Webmaster Central. Here are some of the gems from the other side of the argument:

“If the pages aren’t well-linked and have low PageRank, they are unlikely to rank well for queries, so that problem should also be obvious to the webmaster, even if the pages are indexed. I always encourage webmasters to continue doing all of the things we recommend in our guidelines (ensuring the site is crawlable, well linked, has quality, unique content, etc.). A Sitemap doesn’t replace all of those things. It simply is an additional tool for webmasters.”

OK. Well, that’s nice. But if webmasters are doing of the things they are supposed to be doing, namely, creating good links, writing quality, unique content and ensuring their website is crawlable, then what added benefit does a Sitemap offer? If you want a good answer, you have to ask the right questions.

“Most site owners aren’t experts on optimization – they simply want their pages indexed. Sitemaps help all site owners — from the very small mom and pop to the very large company tell us about the pages of their site and provide input to us.”

OK. Well, that’s sweet, Vanessa. But what benefit do Sitemaps provide? Can you tell us that part again?

“If the site has pages with errors that prevent us from crawling, the pages won’t appear in the index and those pages will be listed in the Crawl Errors section of webmaster tools. We may not have attempted to crawl some of these pages if they weren’t in the Sitemap, so in this case, a webmaster might be alerted to problems not otherwise known.”

Oh, well, that clears it up. Let me make sure i understand this. If a webmaster is doing everything right – building quality links, writing dynamite quality and original content, making their website crawlable – then Sitemaps can be a benefit because we can actually tell Google which pages to crawl and if we have pages that can’t be crawled then those pages will appear on a Google Webmaster tools page that we can go and check on periodically to see why we’re not being crawled properly. Did I understand that right?

Let’s see, what does Google’s website say? In the Webmaster Help Center we read:

Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as “spiders” to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

Really? So the vast majority of websites aren’t submitted for inclusion? Why is that? Because Google’s spiders automatically crawl the web? And if you’re doing all the right things – building solid links, writing quality original content, making your site crawlable – then you will get crawled, right? So why do you need a Sitemap?

To determine whether your site is currently included in Google’s index, just perform a search for your site’s URL.

So if I just copy and paste the URL of all of my pages into Google’s search box then I can look to see if my site is indexed? And if it isn’t? Then, I guess I should just conclude that I’m not doing all the right things like link building, writing quality original content, etc. etc.?

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it’s inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it’s frequently for one of the following reasons:

* The site isn’t well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
* The site launched after Google’s most recent crawl was completed.
* The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
* The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google webmaster tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.

Well, I guess that about sums it up. Sitemaps may not be a negative but they don’t seem to provide a whole lot of benefit either. And if you don’t gain anything then why spend any time on it? Our advice: Just focus on building quality original content for your website and building valuable internal and inbound links. Google will crawl it.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under MAIN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.