Comments on: Do XML Sitemaps Actually Help?

By: eranga

eranga — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:26:47 +0000

Something new to me

Thanks For Sharing….
era

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 05:43:23 +0000

Thanks for the article post, learn a thing or two from it.

Thanks for share,
Tony

By: Wesley LeFebvre

Wesley LeFebvre — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:01:15 +0000

You’re Welcome, Ruth!

By: Ruth

Ruth — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 13:52:16 +0000

Thanks for this valuable information. We are going to be developing a web site for our church in the near future and we need to put a blog on the site. Thanks. Ruth

By: Wesley LeFebvre

Wesley LeFebvre — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:13:08 +0000

Hi Dmitry!
Yeah, the crawler usually does just fine. I feel it’s a better use of my time further optimizing each website, creating content, etc. Those things will help increase my rankings as well as entice the crawler to return more frequently. Maintaining the Sitemap only accomplishes one of those two, even if it is working as expected.

By: Dmitry Gushchin

Dmitry Gushchin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:36:09 +0000

Very good tip!

I completely removed sitemap.xml today from the site, because for some reason Google didn’t index the pages that were there:

Yesterday my sitemap had 9 pages and 9 pages were indexed.
Today it has the same 9 pages but only 7 of them are indexed.

It gives me an idea that supporting the sitemap – is a waste of time.

Additionally, one can consider removing the sitemap because of issues with priorities: once you set the sitemap without priorities for the site – you tells crawler ‘Hey! Here are my pages and all of them have the same priority for you.’. Obviously it’s not true, because it is rare situation. So you need you need to carefully reconsider the priorities each time a new page is created.

Why bother – if the crawler can officially do this part of job instead of you?