Getting started with XML sitemaps
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to XML sitemaps for teams who have not touched it before.
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.
The reason this keeps coming up
A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Only list pages you actually want indexed
- Change one thing and measure it
Keep it current or it works against you. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
The short version
Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about XML sitemaps before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.