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Will an XML sitemap improve SEO in terms of crawling, indexing, and ranking? Question
I've heard that I should create an XML sitemap containing all the URLs from my site for SEO.
My site needs to improve:
- The number of URLs that get crawled by search engine bots
- The number of URLs that get indexed by search engines
- The rankings of the URLs that are already indexed
Will an XML sitemap help?
1 answer
XML sitemaps are not necessary for SEO. They don't affect Google's decisions about which URLs get indexed, nor do they help the pages in them rank better.
The two SEO benefits of XML sitemaps are:
- URL Discovery -- They tell search engine bots about your URLs. This lets the bots easily discover and crawl those URLs. (However search engines decide not to index many URLs that their bots crawl.)
- Stats -- When you add an XML sitemap to Google Search Console, Google will tell you which URLs from it are indexed and which are not. This gives you visibility into that the particular set of URLs in the sitemap.
Relying on solely on XML sitemaps for URL discovery is a bad idea. The other way that search engines discover URLs is using links from other pages they crawl. Unlike XML sitemap, links from other pages DO help with indexing and rankings. Linking to all the pages on your site from other pages is much more important for SEO than creating an XML sitemap. For best SEO, you should implement a link structure that:
- Allows you to navigate from the home page of your site to any other page in just a handful of clicks. This is usually achieved by creating a category hierarchy or tagging all your pages.
- Every page should have links to and from several other pages. This can be achieved by linking each page to 5 to 10 other pages that are similar or related in some way.
XML sitemaps are easy enough to create that many sites create them for their modest SEO benefits. However, removing your XML sitemap (or not having one to begin with) is unlikely to hurt your SEO if your site has a good link structure (which you need for SEO anyway).
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