Remove sitemap, effect ranking?

[rijwielcashencarry040]

We are considering to remove our sitemap because it doesn't display the right structure. Will it affect current rankings if we remove the sitemap en continuing without a sitemap?

Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Patrick has covered everything you need to know here, and most importantly, it wont hurt your rankings one bit.

-Andy

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

No, it will not hurt your rankings for not having one. That being said, you should have one because it makes crawling your site easier for search engines and also helps inform them of any changes made to your website. If search engines offer you a hand, you should take it - sitemaps are a hand.

Sitemaps also make it so you're also not relying as heavily on search engines to find you from external links. This is important because if you don't have many backlinks pointing to your website, you're waiting on those sites to be crawled to find yours. Same concept with internal links - if you have broken internal links (which you shouldn't - you should be crawling regularly to check) and pages can't be found because of that, a sitemap can help search engines understand that the page does exist, even if internal links are broken.

I use them - they are worth the effort, you can do a lot with them, they are directly uploaded to both Google and Bing.

If I were you, I would look into generators so that you don't have to manual upload or edit your sitemap. If you have the wrong structure currently, have a generator will ensure that you do have the right structure and that it's up to date.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Alick300]

Hi,

xml sitemap is not a ranking factor so it won't affect your current ranking. But an XML sitemap is necessary if you want to build a crawlable site. Each time you create a new page or edit an existing page you should update sitemap.

Hope this helps.

Thanks