February 22nd, 2007 by James Omdahl
A couple days back, Rand over at SEOmoz mentioned that he does not use the Google Sitemaps functionality in Google Webmaster Central, and that he thinks that most people don’t need to. It seems that that position was a bit controversial with some webmasters, while others wholeheartedly agreed. Read the whole post and the comments here.
For those of you who are totally lost, Google Sitemaps is a program that allows you to submit your web pages to Google for indexing. Google says this helps because:
Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell us information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps.
So basically, it helps you control the crawling of your web pages. Sounds pretty good, no? Well, Rand says no. He points out that submitting a site map to Google will make it more difficult to find the pages in your site that don’t meet Google’s requirements for indexing. Also, he says that submitting through the Site Maps program leads to forcing not-so-hot content into Google…which might not be a good thing.
On the other side of the argument, Michael Gray says that he is a regular user of Google Site Maps, and he thinks there are plenty of benefits to submitting your site through the program.
Seems like the experts are all over the board on this one. Personally, I don’t use Site Maps, mainly because I feel like we are spidered adequately without it. I figure that if your site has good inbound links and an adequate internal linking structure, Google is going to find your pages.
But what do I know, eh?
What do you think? Are you using Google Site Maps?
Let us know in the comments.
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February 23rd, 2007 at 1:40 am
I get tired of this rigid emphasis on Google. If you focus on Google you get less than half the traffic, according to recent Nielsen statistics - 49% to be exact. Yahoo delivers 24% of the total search engine traffic and MSN 10%. Sounds like a great opportunity for us that dont want to join the current one-eyed Google-only movement.
The joint Google/Yahoo/MSN sitemap format is described at http://www.sitemaps.org. You maintain your Yahoo sitemaps with the Yahoo Site Explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. As far as I know, MSN Search doesnt provide a user interface for sitemaps yet.
If you think you have linking problems within your site, there are numerous ways to test for that. I dont think search engine spiders are valid testers of anything.
Search engines account for a LOT of traffic on my web sites, like 25% or so. If I can use sitemaps to reduce that wild, uncontrolled traffic, Im really happy.
February 23rd, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Hey Magnus - thanks for your input.
I know we tend to focus on Google because it does have the majority of the traffic out there. But I do understand why a lot of people have decided to stop worrying about Google.
You make some good points - and they are certainly something to consider when deciding if you want to submit a site map or not.