Is a site map necessary or recommended?
-
We have a website that has been up for the past 4 years without a site map.
Google is indexing it. Do we need a site map? Do you recommend we create one and submit it to goggle and bing?
The site is www.logobids.com
Thank you.
-
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the tip. I checked and our .xml sitemap has 55 pages and Google is indexing 53. not sure what the 2 missing pages are or how to find out, but I imagine the difference may have to do with blog archives or something along those lines. At any rate, I'm reassured by this. Thanks again.
Gina
-
Hi Gina,
If you use Google Webmaster Tools you can see how many pages you submitted on your sitemap and how many Google has indexed under Optimization > Sitemaps.
It will also list if you have an issues with your xml sitemap.
Hope this helps.
Mike
-
I would say that the sitemap is not needed per say, however, it is good practice to have one, whether it be for client navigation around a site or to assist Google with the root navigation of the website.
From the earlier days in my SEO career I was taught to always incorporate a few standard items as basic procedure as they once you are used to the routine you cannot do any harm if even Google no longer needs then, these were things like sitemap.html, sitemap.xml and robot.txt.
It seems like Google is no longer taking a sitemap for the same purpose as it used to as the technology is advancing, so it now seems like personal preference.
A little bit like the old:
"Which should you do first, On-page SEO or Off-page SEO?" debate.
Hope this helps.
-
It's not needed per se, but then if you have a large website and you think about the user and you want them to be easily able to find sections of your website, it can't hurt to have a HTML sitemap.
As for XML sitemap, the only reason I consider doing them to make sure if there are any issues of indexability, I know. So that I can act on that information and do something. Otherwise for a large scale website with over hundreds and thousands of pages, how'd you know if you have a section of your site not indexed for whatever reasons ?
-
This is a strong indicator something is up and deserves deeper investigation.
Perhaps you have content duplication issues, low value content (Panda), spammy back links (Penguin) or other indexing issue. See if there is a pattern to the missing pages, perhaps one of the directories is the cause. How old is the site and how is the domain trust/authority coming along?
-
I'm jumping in here with an offshoot question for Mike. (or anyone else with an idea)
You suggest "If you Google site:logobids.com you can see which of your pages Google has indexed."
I just tried that and only 10 out of 40+ pages on our site are coming up. We have both an html site map and an xml site map on our site. There isn't any noindex code on the site other than for blog comments.
Any idea why Google isn't showing them all?
Thanks!!
-
A stale or poorly created sitemap can hurt in the following ways:
- long lived 404 pages - deleted pages continue to be indexed if not removed from the sitemap
- use up Google indexing allowance - if 404 and low value pages are included, Googlebot will use up valuable indexing allowance on them vs covering more of your important content.
- links to private areas - depending on how the map is created, the tool may not be smart enough to not include administration or community pages that you don't want in the index.
- inclusion of noindex pages - a couple methods (such as a robot.txt update after a sitemap is created) will include noindex pages which a technical problem. I'm not 100% sure of the impact but I could see this being a quality indicator.
- create distracting work - maintaining sitemaps, particularly semi-manual ones from Xenu etc., suck time better spent improving your indexability or earning back links.
However, all of these are easily avoidable with a solid approach and/or good server side tools.
-
Thank you for the responses. It seems like it is something that cant hurt the site or the indexing. The sacrifice is my time, other than that it has nothing but upsides and no downside.
I think we will go forward with creating the site map and submitting to Google.
-
I don't have a site map on any of my sites. Never any problem getting indexed or ranking. None.
-
I may get chastised for this but I believe the value of sitemaps is over stated.
All things being equal, I feel they are crutches and band-aids for poor webdesign/production.
Your site should:
- be easily indexed by all engines
- expose all pages with in four-five links of the home page(s)
- utilize thoughtful linking to promote important content in an organic manner
- expose new content on a high value, frequently indexed page (ie the home page) long enough to be found
- be consistent enough that the site will seem similar after one or two passes by Googlebot.
I like sitemaps when big structural changes occur as the sites heal faster. They're good when a lots of pages are only exposed via a long pagination scheme. I also use them to break down parts of a site to expose problem areas (IE when a sitemap has 50 links but Google only indexes 25 of them)
But, they can be detrimental if they are not maintained properly. If anything changes in the structure, it should be immediately reflected in the sitemap. Lots of automated ones don't consider the robot.txt file which can cause problems.
For SEOs, adding a sitemap is an easy way to ensure everything is at least looked at without having to touch the actual site.
Advice: yes, use them but only if you can use them properly or can't fix current indexing issues. Over the long haul however, you should force yourself to think of it as not there.
-
A sitemap is like a map with driving directions for Google. Sure they can probably find their way through your site, but with a map they can get through more efficiently and make sure to look at all of your pages.
It is not required for a site to get indexed.
If you entire site is indexed, you don't "need" a sitemap; however, it is good practice to have one.
Say you add a new page and want it to get indexed quickly by Google, you would just update your sitemap and submit it to Google. It alerts them you have made changes and to reindex your site.
If you Google site:logobids.com you can see which of your pages Google has indexed.
Hope this helps.
Mike
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
-
Online classified ads site - duplicate content?
Hello, I was reading hobo s post on duplicate content. Our web is in the classified advertisement industry and our site is built up like this Homepage (last 200 ads) category 1(has the name we want to rank our homepage and around 350 ads) category 2 (around 100 ads) category 3 (around 60 ads) Now our homepage has 200 ads that also appear mostly in category 1 but also in others. We are ranking our homepage as 11 th now on Google. I'm worried a bit that the 200 ads on the homepage are not unique, because they will appear in one other category. Is this OK? Is this duplication? Should we do something? Issue is that we at first started ranking our homepage where all ads were, now there are too many so we show 200 latest on homepage and then they are split into category pages.
On-Page Optimization | | advertisingcloud0 -
New site pages are indexed but not ranking for anything
I just built this site for a client http://primedraftarchitecture.com. It went live 3 weeks ago and the pages are getting indexed as per Webmaster Tools. But I'm not seeing it rank for anything. We're adding blog articles regularly and used Moz Local for local links and have been building links in other local directories (probably about 15 so far). Usually I get some rankings, although very low, after just a week or two for new sites. Does anyone see anything glaring that may be causing a problem?
On-Page Optimization | | DonaldS1 -
On-page Optimization - Is an A grade absolutely necessary?
It is commonly stated that three exact keyword mentions on a page is best practice for SEO. Recently, however, I have noticed a few articles that have hinted against it. matt @highonseo briefly mentioned the subject here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/going-beyond-moz-metrics-to-answer-why-is-this-site-outranking-me Also, one our clients competitors is ranking above them with only one exact mention of the keyword in the page title with no exact mentions in page copy. I know other factors can make a difference, but this is does raise questions of our on-site strategy. I haven’t found any literature that specifically recommends using one exact match of a keyword, so any opinion would be very useful! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | PeteW0 -
Large Site - Advice on Subdomaining
I have a large news site - over 1 million pages (have already deleted 1.5 million) Google buries many of our pages, I'm ready to try subdomaining http://bit.ly/dczF5y There are two types of content - news from our contributors, and press releases. We have had contracts with the big press release companies going back to 2004/5. They push releases to us by FTP or we pull from their server. These are then processed and published. It has taken me almost 18 months, but I have found and deleted or fixed all the duplicates I can find. There are now two duplicate checking systems in place. One runs at the time the release comes in and handles most of them. The other one runs every night after midnight and finds a few, which are then handled manually. This helps fine-tune the real-time checker. Businesses often link to their release on the site because they like us. Sometimes google likes this, sometimes not. The news we process is reviews by 1,2 or 3 editors before publishing. Some of the stories are 100% unique to us. Some are from contributors who also contribute to other news sites. Our search traffic is down by 80%. This has almost destroyed us, but I don't give up easily. As I said, I've done a lot of projects to try to fix this. Not one of them has done any good, so there is something google doesn't like and I haven't yet worked it out. A lot of people have looked and given me their ideas, and I've tried them - zero effect. Here is an interesting and possibly important piece of information: Most of our pages are "buried" by google. If I dear, even for a headline, even if it is unique to us, quite often the page containing that will not appear in the SERP. The front page may show up, an index page may show up, another strong page pay show up, if that headline is in the top 10 stories for the day, but the page itself may not show up at all - UNTIL I go to the end of the results and redo the search with the "duplicates" included. Then it will usually show up, on the front page, often in position #2 or #3 According to google, there are no manual actions against us. There are also no notices in WMT that say there is a problem that we haven't fixed. You may tell me just delete all of the PRs - but those are there for business readers, as they always have been. Google supposedly wants us to build websites for readers, which we have always done, What they really mean is - build it the way we want you to do it, because we know best. What really peeves me is that there are other sites, that they consistently rank above us, that have all the same content as us, and seem to be 100% aggregators, with ads, with nothing really redeeming them as being different, so this is (I think) inconsistent, confusing and it doesn't help me work out what to do next. Another thing we have is about 7,000+ US military stories, all the way back to 2005. We were one of the few news sites supporting the troops when it wasn't fashionable to do so. They were emailing the stories to us directly, most with photos. We published every one of them, and we still do. I'm not going to throw them under the bus, no matter what happens. There were some duplicates, some due to screwups because we had multiple editors who didn't see that a story was already published. Also at one time, a system code race condition - entirely my fault, I am the programmer as well as the editor-in-chief. I believe I have fixed them all with redirects. I haven't sent in a reconsideration for 14 months, since they said "No manual spam actions found" - I don't see any point, unless you know something I don't. So, having exhausted all of the things I can think of, I'm down to my last two ideas. 1. Split all of the PRs off into subdomains (I'm ready to pull the trigger later this week) 2. Do what the other sites do, that I believe create little value, which is show only a headline and snippet and some related info and link back to the original page on the PR provider website. (I really don't want to do this) 3. Give up on the PRs and delete them all and lose another 50% of the income, which means releasing our remaining staff and upsetting all of the companies and people who linked to us. (Or find them all and rewrite them as stories - tens of thousands of them) and also throw all our alliances under the bus (I really don't want to do this) There is no guarantee this is the problem, but google won't tell me, the google forums are crap, and nobody else has given me an idea that has helped. My thought is that splitting them off into subdomains will have a number of effects. 1. Take most of the syndicated content onto subdomains, so its not on the main domain. 2. Shake up the Domain Authority 3. Create a million 301 redirects. 4. Make it obvious to the crawlers what is our news and what is PRs 5. make it easier for Google News to understand Here is what I plan to do 1. redirect all PRs to their own subdomain. pn.domain.com for PRNewswire releases bw.domain.com for Businesswire releases etc 2. Fix all references so they use the new subdomain Here are my questions - and I hope you may see something I haven't considered. 1. Do you have any experience of doing this? 2. What was the result 3. Any tips? 4. Should I put PR index pages on the subdomains too? I was originally planning to keep them on the main domain, with the individual page links pointing to the actual release on the subdomain. Obviously, I want them only in one place, but there are two types of these index pages. a) all of the releases for a particular PR company - these certainly could be on the subdomain and not on the main domain b) Various category index pages - agriculture, supermarkets, mining etc These would have to stay on the main domain because they are a mixture of different PR providers. 5. Is this a bad idea? I'm almost out of ideas. Should I add a condensed list of everything I've done already? If you are still reading, thanks for hanging in.
On-Page Optimization | | loopyal0 -
Keyword optimization of main keyword across site.
My site is optimized for keyword "payment gateway" but it seems for each keyword only one page should be optimized as per good SEO. So if I've a page about Paypal then how should I spread the keywords? Here the main will be Paypal and site keyword will be payment gateway. It means site should have more Paypal than payment gateway. But can payment gateway be in 3rd or 4th position in density? Similarly how should I create other pages? How search engines determine the site authority based on keyword? ( let us ignore the external backlinks, context of them and anchor texts).
On-Page Optimization | | rag_gupta0 -
How do I get rid of duplicate page titles when using a php site?
Hi. I have an e-commerce site that sells a list of products. The list is divided into categories and then those categories for the various pages on the site. An example of a page title. would be given root/products.php?c=40 another page would be given root/products.php?c=41 Is there a way to structure the site with SEO in mind?
On-Page Optimization | | curtisgibbsiii0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20 -
Is Google Places appropriate for an ecommerce site and blogs
I'm working with a client that has an ecommerce site. He has e physical addresses where they work, however, neither would want customers to go to their office. Is it inappropriate to create a Google Places listing in this situation? I'm working with another client who runs a blog for his PR agency. Is it OK to create a Google Places listing for a blog? He would welcome people to visit his agency.
On-Page Optimization | | EricVallee340