Sitemap news and FAQs

January 17, 2008

Sitemaps are an important part of any successful website and SEO campaign for two main reasons: The search engines use sitemaps to index all of your content and pages and it helps human users find their way to all of your content.

To accomplish these two important goals you actually need two types of sitemaps. First, you need an HTML version which is used and navigated by humans. Then you need to build an XML version that the search engines spiders use to index your content.

Google recently posted some information and answers about sitemaps and below is a summary of the important points.

1) Sitemaps do not guarantee inclusion in search results, they just help Google find your pages and they augment their usual crawl and discovery processes. It simply helps them understand your site better.

2) A sitemap by itself will not guarantee a higher ranking but if it helps the search engines find and index more of your pages then you have a better chance of being found.

3) The page importance number that’s used in a sitemap does not figure into your ranking. It simply tells Google the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site.

4) You will not get penalized for submitting a sitemap unless it helps Google discover spammy or low quality content.

5) You don’t have to put your sitemap in your root directory but it’s still probably a good idea in my opinion.

6) A standard HTML sitemap is good but it’s a better idea to have both HTML and XML. If you have an easily navigable site you could probably just stick with the XML version. Plus it will help you get more out of your Google Webmaster Tools account.

7) Placement of information within your sitemap (beginning or end) does not matter.

You may use multiple sitemap files and you may consider using a sitemap index file to list them all.