News and information for online web publishing professionals!
What SEO’S Don’t Want You To Know About Sitemaps!
What SEO’S Don’t Want You To Know About Sitemaps! Guest article by Shannon - visit his SEO Blog
Ever read or seen where SEOS suggest that a sitemap is a must for every website?
Ever wondered how they really help? The problem is that they don’t, having a sitemap is just another well spread SEO myth that keeps newb seos going around in circles and never gaining ground.
Im not saying a sitemap is totally useless, but the thought behind having one to improve ranking and the search engines ability to find your website urls is just plain balony.
Search engine rankings are obtained naturally by creating content that people want and need to link to. The sitemap is useless to the engines if you have something worth linking to. No other explanation is necessary other then that but for those hard nosed html and xml sitemap lovers I have more to say on the subject!
There are countless free sites out there to generate xml and html sitemaps automatically. Generating one by hand can be difficult and time consuming not to mention the various headaches you will get when doing it!
The reason this is so hard is simple, its not needed and those who believe it is are just not good seos. If a seo company suggests to you that you need a sitemap all I can say is… “RUN FAST” it’s a huge myth that needs exploiting.
Think of a sitemap like this, the sitemap is a police scanner, it allows the search engines to find you easier. What the police (search engines) failed to realize is that it is day time and they could see the getaway car (your site) better without some gizmo to try and tell them where it is.
Natural rankings are where its at and if your site is worth being indexed and being linked to it will. If its not then perhaps you need to sit back and think about your whole sites approach.
Read more at Shannon’s SEO Blog
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Thanks Mike for this tip.
Comment by Aghper — March 20, 2008 @ 9:19 pm
This is comforting. I have not paid much attention to the sitemap except making it available for user to navigate. This info helps to reduce another piece of effort to get our website seo optimise.
Comment by tonypsc — April 6, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
Thank you Mike for allowing Shannon to contradict himself.
“Think of a sitemap like this, the sitemap is a police scanner, it allows the search engines to find you easier.”
Hhhmmm, seems as though what search engine optimizers don’t want people to know is that it assists in faster indexing, as stated by Google in it’s own webmaster central within its suggested best practices.
Comment by chicagoseopro — May 17, 2008 @ 7:16 am