SEO Recap – Google's Sitemap

It’s time to talk about sitemaps. What are they? What is their purpose? How many do you need? What kind works best?

The sitemap you really need for SEO is the Google Sitemap. Many webmasters also create a static page with organized links to all sectors of their  site for easier user navigation. When we are talking about Sitemaps with a capital S, we refer to Google’s-  a lowercase s means your own sitemap for your visitors.

Google introduced Sitemap was introduced originally in 2005 as an experiment, with the search engine announcing that “Initially, we plan to use the URL information webmasters supply to further improve the coverage and freshness of our index.” The idea was to make indexing sites faster and more efficient by giving the Google bot a quick and easy road map to the site instead of having to follow innumerable internal links.

Google Sitemap not only tells Google’s search bot how often it should visit the site, but how  frequently the page’s content will be updated. The Sitemap allows you (to an extent) to control the timing of Googlebot visits. This helps websites whose content is regularly updated to get the latest version indexed. If there is no such Sitemap available, Google is forced to use it’s normal crawling schedule, and will perform its regular crawling with as long as a several months gap between the two successive visits.

If you’ve been working on your site making several updates to your site, online users will miss those updates in the search results because Google’s cache will hold only the older version of your site’s material. This could result in the loss of the visitors who might have decided  to click on your website in the search results page looking at the updated meta description. This means you could be losing traffic while you wait for the bot to return.

In addition,  when the search engine bots crawl your website the regular way, they could possibly not find some of the pages for various reasons. In some cases, some of the pages might not be accessible through site navigation menu but can be accessed only through the site’s search feature – a typical condition with eCommerce sites.

That means that these products pages will never get indexed which means you are failing to leverage the maximum potential of your website. On the other hand, when you supply Google with a Sitemap that lists all the pages in your website including hidden products pages, Google’s search bot will be able to quickly find and index every single page.

Google’s Sitemap is a XML file, which provides as list of URLs, change frequency, date of latest modification and other information. The Google bot will use all of this information to get the latest information from your site, and will re-index your site more frequently. Obviously a Sitemap is very necessary for best ranking on Google.  Also, if your website is managed dynamically, you really need an XML Sitemap with the latest list of URLs.

Google bot also receives information from the Sitemap about the relative importance of various pages. By giving Google your input on which pages are important through the communication of the Sitemap, you allow the Google bot make a note of this information to be used for the next crawl.