Sitemap.xml can get pages Indexed, but not Ranking
10th February 2010 by Pete Handley
At the beginning of August last year, the Vertical Leap SEO team decided to undertake a small test with an XML sitemap.
It involved adding a new page to the website (targeting a local based phrase, rather than anything of primary importance) without any links to it from anywhere on the World Wide Web, other than from the websites sitemap.xml file.
My perception of the use of this file, is to provide a guideline for search engines on what pages you would like them to index – and based upon that Google et al use other factors to determine whether or not they will choose to index that particular page of a website – mainly based upon the strength of internal and external links to that page.
For some time I believed that this experiment “proved” what I had suspected all along – that an XML sitemap alone would not be enough to get a page indexed. However whilst reviewing the indexed pages for the website in question, I found that on January 30th, this page had actually been indexed by Google.
This surprised me quite a bit, as I had been monitoring closely in the first few months of the test to see if this page would be indexed, and was prepared to write off the experiment. I even blogged XML Sitemaps – do they really get pages indexed (perhaps a little hastily only just a month in) about the failure of my test, and at the time it seemed the rest of the people I spoke to were unsurprised that this page wasnt indexed.
However – and this is perhaps the most important part of the test – this web page in question has had absolutely no referred traffic to it. I did some ranking tests of some long unique text strings and the page didn’t come up at all in Google. I then searched for a whole paragraph on an exact match search, and 0 results were returned by Google.
I then performed similar checks in Bing and Yahoo too. Bing hasn’t indexed the page at all, although Yahoo has done – and in fact, Yahoo does return search results for some longer string phrases that appear on the page, with and without exact match selected. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the page doesn’t rank for the local phrase that we were specifically optimising this page for (at least not in the top 100 pages)
This suggests to me that whilst an XML sitemap may well be sufficient to get pages indexed (after some time) in Google & Yahoo, that this alone, unsurprisingly, is not enough to get that page ranking for even a low competition phrase. This does further indicate that a good internal linking structure, coupled with decent external links alongside the on page SEO is going to be necessary to get pages ranking in the search engines for phrases that you are targeting.
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2 Comments to Sitemap.xml can get pages Indexed, but not Ranking
February 10, 2010 at 5:42 pm by Paddy Moogan
I’m in two minds as to the usefulness of XML sitemaps. We recently relaunched a pretty big Ecommerce site that involved a lot of 301s and new URLs for Google to find. I held back on submitting a new sitemap to Google as I wanted to see how Google indexed the site on its own. This can help identify potential problems in site structure and internal linking.
But on the other hand I’ve seen examples similar to your own experiment which proves sitemaps can get pages indexed. However I’d just add that I think sitemaps are good for getting pages “discovered” rather than properly indexed and ranking. Hence the reason your page was indexed but not showing up for exact text searches. Add a link or two from other pages on your site and I’d bet it would start showing up.
Cheers for the post Pete!
May 19, 2010 at 4:48 pm by Alex
XML sitemaps use an open standard format, intended to allow the search engines to crawl your site more easily. It’s always best to provide sitemaps to the search engines, as not only will it allow your site to be more easily crawled, the search engines don’t crawl every page of the site, so implementing a sitemap will increase the chances of the site being indexed more rigorously.
The true benefit although marginal, is beneficial and for the short period of time it takes to create a sitemap, it is worth doing. Add the URL of a new page to the sitemap speeds encourages indexing.