Google XML Sitemaps : Essential FAQ
June 17th, 2008 by
A SEJ reader sent in the following question:
Is it a must to create a sitemap for your site and submit it to Google? Can it harm?
This is an often asked question, surprisingly. Webmaster forums keep discussing horror stories how their site traffic dropped after they created a sitemap and submitted it to Google Webmaster Tools. So here I am giving a list of frequently asked sitemap-related questions to cover all this FUD.
Is a sitemap a must for a newly launched site?
No, decent link structure and well-formed semantic structure should come in the first place.
Does a Sitemap help in indexing new sites?
The only role of a sitemap is to discover new sites and new URLs. This doesn’t mean Google will spider or index them. However there have been rumors that sitemaps might help in faster crawling and indexing and even in long-tail ranking. (more…)
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