How do you decide whether you need to submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools?
From my experiments over the past year I have found a few interesting conclusions of the effectiveness of the Google Sitemap’s tool. Basically, there is only one reason I would use the Sitemaps feature, if your site has a lot of new content added every day that can possibly be 20-50 clicks deep on your site. These pages are very difficult for Google to pick up quickly, and with a site that is this deep it most likely has millions of pages.
Use this simple logic to determine if your pages belong in the sitemap, if you cannot click to the page from some sort of easy navigation, don’t bother submitting it. Orphaned content will not get ranked, unless it’s linked to by an outside source. If a user can’t click to it most likely they will not find it anyways, unless you run a search based site. Search based sites offer a huge nightmare to crawlers, at this point in time crawlers do not know how to search your site. Thus I would recommend using the keywords that you have in your search logs to create pages. Offer an easy way to get users to these predefined searches and ensure that the URL’s to these search results are clean and are not full of parameters.
From my tests I have submitted sitemaps with millions of pages that have been around for at least a few months, after my tests I could not measure an impact to these pages. Since they where so well indexed before.
What have your experiences been with Google Sitemaps?
Use this simple logic to determine if your pages belong in the sitemap, if you cannot click to the page from some sort of easy navigation, don’t bother submitting it. Orphaned content will not get ranked, unless it’s linked to by an outside source. If a user can’t click to it most likely they will not find it anyways, unless you run a search based site. Search based sites offer a huge nightmare to crawlers, at this point in time crawlers do not know how to search your site. Thus I would recommend using the keywords that you have in your search logs to create pages. Offer an easy way to get users to these predefined searches and ensure that the URL’s to these search results are clean and are not full of parameters.
From my tests I have submitted sitemaps with millions of pages that have been around for at least a few months, after my tests I could not measure an impact to these pages. Since they where so well indexed before.
What have your experiences been with Google Sitemaps?
Labels: google webmaster tools, in house seo, seo
by Aaron Shear
2 Comments:
I work with smaller sites, and I've found that submitting a site map to Google's Web Master Tools has performed literal MAGIC for these tiny "micro" sites.
One such site was 8 years old. The site was poorly designed and broke almost every SEO rule known to man. Once we submitted a site map, all 10 pages were showing up in Google within a week. I achieved "God-like" status in this clients eyes with that little tool.
Hi Kathy, this is interesting I have not tried it on very small sites. I wonder if Google was crawling them at all before.
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