Three myths about XML sitemaps
It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few things about XML sitemaps that get repeated more often than they get checked.
Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
“It only matters for big sites”
A sitemap helps crawlers find pages links do not reach well. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.
“We can deal with it after launch”
Sometimes true, usually expensive. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions.
“Our platform handles it”
Keep it current or it works against you. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
How to tell if yours is fine
Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. 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.