XML Sitemaps – do they really get pages indexed?
11th September 2009 by Pete Handley
I’ve been reading a lot of chatter about how the XML sitemaps are not as useful as they have been previously.
We recently undertook a little SEO experiment of adding a new page to the Vertical Leap website, with no links from any navigation anywhere, with the only reference to the page placed in the websites XML sitemap. We were trying to find out if the Vertical Leap domain strength, coupled with the XML sitemap reference would actually be enough to get the page indexed.
We didn’t necessarily expect the page to be indexed, but we thought it was an interesting exercise to see if the XML sitemap could do this.
After all, the XML sitemap is designed to tell the search engines about all the pages that you want them to index – so if you add a page here you are requesting that this page is indexed irrespective of where this is in the site structure.
A month on from the start of this experiment, and nothing – the page hasn’t got any visibility in any of the search engines.
In the past, we have used XML sitemaps on websites that have indexing problems, as an additional way to help search engines find the right pages on the site, but this is nothing more than a plaster over the cut – it doesnt solve the actual issue, and whilst it certainly doesnt hurt to add an XML sitemap, its certainly not an alternative to sorting out the issues preventing these pages from being indexed on the website.
Whilst we still create XML sitemaps for our clients websites, make sure these are referenced in robots.txt files as a cover all, we aren’t sure that these are providing that many benefits at the moment. However it certainly can’t hurt, and if it helps the odd page to get indexed more effeciently then it has been worth the effort. However, because you have submitted a sitemap to the engines, it doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to get all of these pages indexed, you still have to have all the other ingredients in place for that to happen.
However, as referenced over at Search Engine Guide, it certainly isnt worth spending $400 for a company to create a Google and Yahoo sitemap to create a file that you can use many tools to create for free (just Google “xml sitemap generator”, and you will come up with a large list).
What does everyone else think about XML sitemaps these days? Comments welcome…
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Tags: XML Sitemap
5 Comments to XML Sitemaps – do they really get pages indexed?
September 11, 2009 at 1:06 pm by Linn
Well, I use sitemaps for the sites I do… and I wouldn’t ever put a URL in there if I wouldn’t link to if from anywhere in on the site.
I understand you did this for testing purposes.
I guess my interpretation of Google has always been “please submit a sitemap as a help to which pages are more important for you, and which pages you want indexed – otherwise, we’ll just do our best in guessing”
September 12, 2009 at 9:56 am by Karl Foxley
Well put! I totally agree that ‘it certainly isn’t worth spending $400 for a company to create a Google and Yahoo sitemap’ as there are so many free services that can be used.
Regards,
Karl
May 28, 2010 at 2:11 pm by Alex
Search engine can crawl your site more easily with XML sitemaps and find new pages quicker. Thanks to a sitemap, you will have more chance to see your site being indexed. Adding the URL of a new page to the sitemap speeds encourages indexing.
August 12, 2010 at 12:45 pm by RWeb Consulting
How about video sitemaps that are now being supported by Google?
I believe it has helped some of my clients probably b/c Google can’t really do a great job discerning what the video’s context is about but if you describe what the video contains in an XML video sitemap its easier for Google to rank that video in their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Thoughts/opinions?
Thanks,
Rob
August 23, 2010 at 10:04 am by Pete Handley
I think you could well have a point with regards to Video Sitemaps here Rob – I certainly remember that video promotion in its infancy was all about getting visibility on a core number of key video sites, because Google was able to use those websites internal verification processes (and their crowd sourced “checks”) as a method to take some of that judgement of video quality away from having to be managed by themselves.
I should probably look at running a similar test at some stage with a video sitemap though, as I havent really needed to use them extensively just yet!