Comments on: Is A Google XML Sitemap Necessary?

By: 30.1 Web Tools For Online Success And To Make Your Life Easier At The Same Time - Web Development

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:03:47 +0000

[...] A free online program that will generate a Google xml sitemap for you. Do you need one? [...]

By: John Hoff

John Hoff — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:17:48 +0000

Thanks keo. I try to keep a good mix between web development and entrepreneurial articles because I think both aspects are important to being a successful web entrepreneur.

See you around.

By: keo

keo — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 04:55:32 +0000

Great post m8, looking forward to more posts like this, so i bookmarked you

By: John Hoff

John Hoff — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:12:18 +0000

Hello Nick, thanks for the comment.

Those are good points. The short answer really is, no, you don’t need a sitemap. However, there are benefits they give you. And those sitemap generators are great for finding errors and broken links you might have on your site, like you mentioned.

If someone is on the fence on whether to have one or not, I’d say go for it.

By: Nick Savage

Nick Savage — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:31:16 +0000

Yes I do believe a sitemap is very beneficial even if I am dissagreed with for the most part.
Why do I believe this?
Answer = You get top search queries which help you to modify the site to better suit google, as well you get crawl stats to help you update your site more often, the more you update the more it will be crawled. You get to see errors on your site and fix them.

This is not all but is enough to spend a minute making a sitemap.

Yes i agree with John Hoff also, a google sitemap is important and not important. If you site is well laid out and you are a pro you have nothing to worry about but is you make mistakes and like stats then get a sitemap added, Takes about one minute for a small site and will make most happier.

By: John Hoff

John Hoff — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:18:13 +0000

Hello Barbara, thanks for stopping by.

I’m curious, how are you hoping it helps?

If you really think about it, are they really all that important? Your website will be spidered by web crawlers whether you have one or not. Also, a sitemap doesn’t do too much for you SEO-wise unless it catches a page that’s not being crawled for some reason (like a nofollow, problem in the robots.txt file, or broken link).

As an example, our landscape website, Modern Landscape, has no xml sitemap and yet it ranks #1 on Yahoo, Google, Ask, MSN and others when people search for landscape companies in las vegas.

I do believe it’s good to have one still - I mean, Google went to all the trouble of dealing with Sitemaps for a reason. I’m currently writing my next post which is about SEO techniques I use and I do mention not to forget the Sitemap, even if it has limited SEO value.

By: Barbara Swafford

Barbara Swafford — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:06:55 +0000

Hi John,

I think sitemaps are pretty important. I remember reading so much about them, I finally added one. I’m hoping it helps.

Barbara Swafford’s last blog post..Interview With Lorelle VanFossen - Part 8 - The Future of Blogging