Five mistakes teams make with XML sitemaps

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit XML sitemaps.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well
• Only list pages you actually want indexed
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Keep it current or it works against you. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Making it stick

In practice

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about XML sitemaps before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Only list pages you actually want indexed — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.