If you’ve looked around in Google’s Webmaster Tools (See Part 4 of my series of posts on the tools), you’ll see where you can upload your sitemap file for your web site.
Now, if you’re an inquisitive person like me, you might be asking yourself some questions, namely:
What are Sitemaps? What does the sitemap do for you? Do you need one?
In this post I will address these questions and hopefully provide satisfactory answers for them.

What are Sitemaps?

Google introduced sitemaps in 2005 as a way to help web crawlers find all the pages of your site. They don’t affect your ranking in search results, those depend on the content of your pages and the links to your pages.

A sitemap is a text file that lists all the URL’s of your site’s web pages. They are written in this format:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>


http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly

This is an xml file, a text file written with tags similar to HTML tags that describe something (in this case the pages of a web site).

For more information on how to make a sitemap go to www.sitemaps.org

You can tell Google (or any other search engine that reads sitemaps) the URL’s of all the pages of your site, the date each one was last modified, how often the pages are changed and the priority of the pages.

What does the Sitemap do for you?

Well, it doesn’t actually do anything directly for you and your site. It’s really for the search engines. It may help you indirectly by making sure that Google indexes all your pages. Google can use the information to make sure they have the most recent version of the page indexed and they can use your self-reported priority to make sure that your most important pages are indexed.

Notice that I said ‘can’ in that previous sentence. Google doesn’t have to use any of this information and there isn’t a clear indication that they do use the information. All they say in the Google Sitemaps FAQ about priority is that it won’t affect how your page is ranked compared to pages on other web sites.

Here’s the Sitemaps FAQ: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/01/sitemaps-faqs.html

Do you need a Sitemap?

If you have easy-to-follow links to all the pages on your site and less than 100 pages, you probably don’t need a Google sitemap.
It won’t hurt to make one and put it up on your site, but I don’t think it will help very much either. Your time would probably be better spent making sure all the pages of your site are easy to find both by Google

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Usability, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.