Sitemap FAQs

After receiving lot of great questions at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago and feedback, Google issue a Sitemaps FAQs. Google has cleared some myths about its Sitemaps tool.

If you submit a sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools, it helps Google to better understand of your site. It can be specially good if your content is not easily discoverable by crawler.

Few people thinks that adding a sitemap influence the ranking/crawler but it is clear myth. Sitemap doesn’t affect the ranking of your pages. It helps only get more crawled of your site.

Setting a top priority (1.0) will not help in high ranking as well. In Google words, “priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.”

Google recommend the XML Sitemap protocol as defined by sitemaps.org because it can easily upgrade and more comprehensive than an Atom or RSS feed, feeds usually only list your most recent URLs.

If you have a multiple sections e.g. blog, a forum then you may submit as few or you can add up to 500.