A sitemap is like a Table of Contents in a book. It shows where the major sections of your site are located and even what individual pages your site has.

Some sitemaps are intended for human visitors; others are for search engines as they “crawl” your site. Those for humans are usually in text and contain links to the pages that are listed. Those for search engines are written in XML, a programming language that the search engines find easy to process.

There are both kinds of sitemaps at IM NewsWatch, for example. At many, if not most, sites around the world, webmasters have been creating and publishing sitemaps for years.

However, some have come to question the importance of sitemaps. What good do they do? Particularly, what good do the XML sitemaps do? Can’t the search engine crawlers just follow the links they find on the home page and eventually find their way to all the pages on the site?

Well, on the Moz site, an expert, Michael Cottam, tackles this question, hoping to get a definitive answer.

Cottam reports, “Google indexes pages because (a) they found them and crawled them, and (b) they consider them good enough quality to be worth indexing. Pointing Google at a page and asking them to index it doesn’t really factor into it.

Having said that, it is important to note that by submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console, you’re giving Google a clue that you consider the pages in the XML sitemap to be good-quality search landing pages, worthy of indexation.”

So, while the sitemap may help you impress Google and the other search engines, they aren’t foolproof.

He goes on to say, “It would appear that Google is taking some measure of overall site quality, and using that site-wide metric to impact ranking — and I’m not talking about link juice here.”

This article is a substantial contribution to your understanding of sitemaps and SEO, in general. You can read the entire article here:

XML Sitemaps: The Most Misunderstood Tool in the SEO’s Toolbox

MOZ.com

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