Do You Need A Sitemap?
A sitemap is a document that you submit to the search engines or file on your website to make your site more crawlable and to make it easier for the search engine robots to find your pages and index them. It’s a useful tool many for many webmasters, but does every website need one?
In a word, no. If your website consists of only five pages then you don’t really need a sitemap. If you do a good job of linking between your pages and develop some inbound links to your website then it isn’t necessary to put up a sitemap so that the search engines can find all five of your pages. Unless you have serious issues with your links and the code on those pages, a sitemap is not a useful tool for you. If your pages aren’t getting crawled and indexed then you should take a look at your code and fix and code issues that you have before submitting a sitemap.
On the other hand, if you have a large website, or if you have a website that is made up of various sections, with a tier structure that causing linking issues between the pages, or if you have multiple pages with the same content and different canonical URLs then a sitemap is a useful tool. Multiple dynamic URLs that rely on session IDs and other special characters can make crawling a website difficult for the search engines. In that case, a sitemap is a useful and necessary tool.
Putting a sitemap on a blog should be done on a case by case basis. Not every blog needs one, but many blogs do. If your blog is crawled often and your pages are getting indexed then a sitemap won’t help. But if you find your blog not getting indexed then a sitemap could help it get indexed. Still, though, you should take a look at your code or template to see how well optimized it is first. Fix any code issues you may have on your site or blog before submitting a sitemap. If you still need assistance getting your website crawled and indexed after you have fixed your code issues then go ahead and implement a sitemap as part of your on site optimization.
2 Responses to “Do You Need A Sitemap?”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
My CMS, the Onyx Manager generates the Sitemap automatically… and I think it helps a little bit both small and big sites… I think if you have it for free… you can use it…
A well desgined site does not “need” a sitemap however I would strongly urge anyone to get one.
ok, so it may improve your coverage somewhat but this is not the big benefit for me.
The use of google and yaoo webmaster tools gives a great insight into the way your visitors and google behaves and you can tune your website accordingly.