 Sitemaps are essential to creating a successful site from both a usability perspective and (of course) a search engine perspective. Implementing an HTML sitemap is a relatively simple task for any Web site, but the implementation of an XML sitemap (the standard sitemap’s cooler, more important big brother) --
-- is a trickier proposition if it’s set up incorrectly, it could actually be detrimental to your rankings.
The Good: Why XML sitemaps?
“Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL...” (Source: http://www.sitemaps.org).
Unlike a standard HTML sitemap, which is essentially just an unordered list of links to the important pages on your site, an XML sitemap conveys other important information targeted directly at the search engine spiders:
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Assigning a priority to your pages: XML sitemaps can indicate (on a 1-5 scale with 1 being most important) the priority of certain pages in relation to other pages on your site. This is a great way to tell the spiders how to prioritize each page of content, resulting in your most important pages being ranked higher than your less important pages.*
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Passing content update information: An XML sitemap can also include two tags:
a) changefreq - tells the spiders how often a page is updated and indicates how often it is likely to change
b) lastmod - tells the spiders when a page was last changed and/or updated
*Google is clear to say that the information you pass is considered to be a “hint” as to how content should be indexed by search engine spiders crawling your site. As such, there is no guarantee that they will index or rank your pages exactly how you indicate. In addition to this, Google Webmaster Central provides some helpful information when you have a sitemap that can’t be overlooked. All of the above being said, Yahoo! and MSN also both look for XML sitemaps.
The Bad: Potential problems with XML sitemaps
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Keeping your sitemap up-to-date: Unless your sitemap is directly connected to a Web content management system (Web CMS) or database that generates the sitemap every time a change is made to a page and submits it to Google, it’s easy for your XML sitemap to quickly become out-of-date.
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Competitive intelligence: If you’re telling the search engines the relative priority of all of your pages, you can bet this information will also be of interest to your competitors. Unfortunately, there’s no way to protect your sitemap such that only the search engines can access it.
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Reduction in natural crawling of your site: Some camps are recommending that XML sitemaps be implemented and verified (through Google, Yahoo!, etc.) but not actually submitted to the engines. The gist of these arguments (and they are valid) is that:
a) you probably aren’t as smart as the spiders at determining the relative “importance” of one page over another on your site (business blinders, not knowing your visitors, etc.), and
b) by adding an XML sitemap to the search engines you are telling them to ignore pages that you may have missed on the sitemap, which may in turn cause problems with crawling. In fact, natural spider crawls will often find issues with your architecture that you weren’t aware of.
Given the information above, if your site is new and doesn’t have hundreds (or thousands) of pages, it’s usually a good idea to create an XML sitemap but NOT submit it to the search engines - at least not until the site has been crawled and you’ve been able to determine if there are any problems with your architecture.
Submitting your sitemap
First, set up a Google account. Next, verify that you are the Web site owner through either Meta Tag or file creation. Google provides very clear instructions about how to do this - essentially, you need to have access to your site to perform these actions. Once you have been verified as the site owner, you can submit the URL of your sitemap. Google Webmaster Tools also provides a host of other information including crawl errors, pages with the highest PageRank, top search queries for your site, and much more.
Much like Google Webmaster Tools, first you require a Yahoo! account and then you’ll need to verify that you are the Web site owner. Yahoo! will then provide you with a file to upload to the root of your site. Once you have been verified as the site owner, you can submit the URL of your sitemap to Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Currently, you can simply submit your XML sitemap through MSN’s regular URL submission page.
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About The Author
Jeff Jones is a Web-optimization specialist. He helps companies improve their Web sites, SEO results and PPC-campaign performance. Connect and collaborate with him on Twitter.
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