Is it safe to not have a sitemap if Google is already crawling my site every 5-10 min?
-
I work on a large news site that is constantly being crawled by Google. Googlebot is hitting the homepage every 5-10 minutes. We are in the process of moving to a new CMS which has left our sitemap nonfunctional. Since we are getting crawled so often, I've met resistance from an overwhelmed development team that does not see creating sitemaps as a priority. My question is, are they right? What are some reasons that I can give to support my claim that creating an xml sitemap will improve crawl efficiency and indexing if we are already having new stories appear in Google SERPs within 10-15 minutes of publication? Is there a way to quantify what the difference would be if we added a sitemap?
-
I agree with Robert on all points.
To keep it out of the dev team's overwhelmed hands, just use http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/ or one of the many free generators online to create your sitemaps intermittently.
Maybe 3 months or 6 months down the road the dev team can come up with something when they're less crushed from the site move and you can have them do something similar to Google XML sitemaps plugin for Wordpress which updates the sitemap everytime you add new content. Until then, submitting the freely generated ones should give Google at least a little heads up and feel like you're doing the right thing.
-
As to your 1, I would agree and suggest that it is important on a couple of SEO levels. If you have just updated a story and by virtue of that you have freshened the content. I would want that indexed quickly to move it up if at all possible. However, if you can tell in GWMT that the site is being indexed a couple of times an hour, I am not sure it strengthens your argument.
As to your 2, I would say yes, but if you did a canonical or a 301 on the previous URL - as you should have - it is irrelevant.
Best,
-
Thanks Robert. As you surmised, our URLs are not changing (thankfully!). Fortunately, for now, our Google News sitemap still works. The only arguments I've come up with so far are:
- Having a sitemap will help SEs recrawl updated stories faster.
- Having a sitemap will help SEs find out when a URL has changed.
In my experience, Google does not index changes to existing pages as quickly as newly published articles. My thinking is that if we supply the changes via sitemap, reindexing speed will improve.
Thoughts?
-
Jon
You state you are a news site and you are moving to a new CMS. Assuming the Domain, URL's are the same, I can understand the dev team resistance. This is from WebMaster tools around news sites (bold is mine):
A Google News Sitemap can help you control which content Google News crawls and can speed up the inclusion of your articles in Google News search results. You're welcome to submit your sitemap in your Webmaster Tools account prior to submitting your site for inclusion in Google News. However, only sitemaps associated with an approved site will be crawled without error by Google News.
So, assuming you are already a Google News approved site, you can most likely move forward without immediately submitting a site map. Call me old fashion, but I still think a site map submission is important. But, again, I do get the dev teams resistance. Hope this at least assists your argument.
One added bit of info, You could use a sitemap generator to take a load off of them. Here is a list of many sitemap generators. Since I am not in the dev shop, I cannot recommend any, but I do use the Screaming Frog Spider (never used their SM Generator) This way the Dev team would have a bit less work.
Hope it helps you out a bit,
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
I have a metadata issue. My site crawl is coming back with missing descriptions, but all of the pages look like site tags (i.e. /blog/?_sft_tag=call-routing)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amarieyoussef0 -
SEO Impact & Google Impact On Removing Product From Category Page for Ecommerce Site
Hello Experts, For my Ecommerce site previously I was showing products at category pages i.e. first all subcategories name after that list all products of all subcateogries. That also approx per category 500 products via load more feature. My query is now I am planning to show products only at Product Listing Page and not on Category pages so what will be SEO impact and how google will treat this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johny123450 -
Some sitemap xml apprears in google search
some sitemap, i have observed, that google is showing in the result for our website.. wht is wrong? any idea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1190 -
Old site penalised, we moved: Shall we cut loose from the old site. It's curently 301 to new site.
Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
Site Migration of 4 sites into 1?
Hi Guys, I have a massive project involving a migration of 4 sites into 1. 4 sites include: **www.MainSite.com ** www.E-commerce.com www.Membership.com www.ResearchStudy.com Goal of this project is to have 1-4 regrouped into Main Site I will be following the best practice from this post https://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos which has an awesome checklist. I am actually about to start Phase 3: URL redirect mapping. Because all of these sites have hundreds of duplicates, I figured I should first resolve the Main Site dup issues before creating the URL redirect mapping but what about the other domains (2,3,4) though? Should I first resolve the Dup issues on those ones as well or it is not necessary since they will be pointing into the Main Site new domain? I want to make sure I don't overwork the programming team and myself. Thanks For sharing your expertise and any tips on how should I move forward with this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Should all pages on a site be included in either your sitemap or robots.txt?
I don't have any specific scenario here but just curious as I come across sites fairly often that have, for example, 20,000 pages but only 1,000 in their sitemap. If they only think 1,000 of their URL's are ones that they want included in their sitemap and indexed, should the others be excluded using robots.txt or a page level exclusion? Is there a point to having pages that are included in neither and leaving it up to Google to decide?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RossFruin1 -
XML Sitemap Index Percentage (Large Sites)
Hi all I'm wanting to find out from those who have experience dealing with large sites (10s/100s of millions of pages). What's a typical (or highest) percentage of indexed pages vs. submitted pages you've seen? This information can be found in webmaster tools where Google shows you the pages submitted & indexed for each of your sitemap. I'm trying to figure out whether, The average index % out there There is a ceiling (i.e. will never reach 100%) It's possible to improve the indexing percentage further Just to give you some background, sitemap index files (according to schema.org) have been implemented to improve crawl efficiency and I'm wanting to find out other ways to improve this further. I've been thinking about looking at the URL parameters to exclude as there are hundreds (e-commerce site) to help Google improve crawl efficiency and utilise the daily crawl quote more effectively to discover pages that have not been discovered yet. However, I'm not sure yet whether this is the best path to take or I'm just flogging a dead horse if there is such a ceiling or if I'm already at the average ballpark for large sites. Any suggestions/insights would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danng0 -
Sitemaps and subdomains
At the beginning of our life-cycle, we were just a wordpress blog. However, we just launched a product created in Ruby. Because we did not have time to put together an open source Ruby CMS platform, we left the blog in wordpress and app in rails. Thus our web app is at http://www.thesquarefoot.com and our blog is at http://blog.thesquarefoot.com. We did re-directs such that if the URL does not exist at www.thesquarefoot.com it automatically forwards to blog.thesquarefoot.com. What is the best way to handle sitemaps? Create one for blog.thesquarefoot.com and for http://www.thesquarefoot.com and submit them separately? We had landing pages like http://www.thesquarefoot.com/houston in wordpress, which ranked well for Find Houston commercial real estate, which have been replaced with a landing page in Ruby, so that URL works well. The url that was ranking well for this word is now at blog.thesquarefoot.com/houston/? Should i delete this page? I am worried if i do, we will lose ranking, since that was the actual page ranking, not the new one. Until we are able to create an open source Ruby CMS and move everything over to a sub-directory and have everything live in one place, I would love any advice on how to mitigate damage and not confuse Google. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0